The Bystander Effect

Numbers 28/27/26

Two teenage girls, one pale blonde and one raven-haired, sat with a teenage boy in a bubbly hot-tub in their bathing suits. They were surrounded by bright lights and a camera pointed at them with it's red recording light flashing steadily. The blonde girl in the middle and the boy on the right looked almost as though they could be twins, except the boy's hair looked more the color of straw rather than a peeled banana sort of off-white yellow like the girl's. These three were the stars of a web show called Nitwits, and had grown a huge following within their year of activity.

"Welcome back to Nitwits!" they said all together.

"You voted," said Davina, the banana blonde.

"So here we are," said the boy, Jeremy.

"The Hot Tub Challenge," said Victoria, the raven-haired, bronzed beauty on the left.

"With bubbles! Yay!" said Davina splashing annoyingly. Stray bubbles splattered the others. "My favorite."

Their manager, Donna, loved putting Davina in the middle, because she was the most active. It put her straight in the view of the cameras, and also helped raise drama with her antics annoying the others from time to time.

Jeremy, clearly hiding his frustration with a wide fake smile, wiped a splash of bubbly water from his hazel eye. "For those of you that don't know, the Hot Tub Challenge is," he says, "we sit here while our colleagues gradually make the water gets hotter. Once it gets too hot for one of us, we get out and become a loser. Winner is the last one in the hot-tub."

"What do we win?" asked Davina, bouncing on her bottom enough to gently splash a bit of water over the side.

"Bragging rights?" said Jeremy.

"I'm hoping for a Starbucks gift card," said Victoria.

"You buy Starbucks every day already," said Davina.

"Which is why I need a gift card..."

Off the camera a crewman said, "It's a surprise." The voice sounds strange, but the Nitwits ignore it, thinking it must be a trick of the mic he was wearing. The don't see any sign of Hayden in him, but she's there watching everything. If they had looked closer, they would have seen the fire burning in the crewman's eyes.

"Oooh, how exciting!" said Jeremy.

"I want this challenge to be over already, my beautiful skin is pruning," said Victoria. "Turn up the heat Calvin!"

Calvin, the crewman with the headset on, pointed a controller toward the settings panel and, with a devilish smile, pressed a few buttons.

The stars sat for a good amount of time, during which Davina annoyingly ordered and ate pizza and donuts. She dropped crumbs in the tub and offered a donut to Victoria, even though she knew Victoria was on a strict diet. The heat went up two more times.

"I'm almost ready to call it," said Victoria. Her chest and forehead were covered in beads of sweat.

"Go ahead and get out, one down," said Jeremy, trying to put on a tough act while his hair was plastered to him with sweat.

Davina mumbled something through a mouth full of pizza, and a possessed Calvin understood it to mean, "Crank up the heat."

"Hey," said Victoria suddenly, "where's the rest of the crew?"

Jeremy looked around curiously. "Miles? Bob? Sherry?" he called out.

"Lunch break," said Hayden/Calvin, and turned up the heat again.

Victoria fanned herself. "Okay, that's enough, I'm out." But the strangest thing happened when she tried to get up. It was as if the water had turned to cement around her, forcing her to stay put. The water still rocked gently from their movements, but it didn't give when she tried to rise. She pushed on the side of the tub, but nothing happened. Her bottom was practically glued to the tub.

"Get me out!" she cried in a panic.

Hayden/Calvin smiled and raised the heat. "You watched me burn," she/he said.

Davina heard the undertones of Hayden's ghostly voice. She spat out her huge mouthful of pizza, and it splashed in the water as if it were any normal tub of water, but when she tried to run out, she discovered she couldn't move either.

"What's going on?" she cried.

Jeremy couldn't stand up, even though he was the strongest of the Nitwits. He could only twist around in the tub, which he did to try and turn the controls down, but they didn't work.

"Cut it out!" he shouted.

The heat only went up.

"You watched me burn, now I'll watch you burn," Hayden/Calvin said.

By the time the real crew arrived at the site, the Nitwits were dead in the tub, covered in melting and blistered skin. Hayden soaked up their life-force long before the real Calvin found their bodies and screamed loud enough to alert the neighbors to call the police. When the police got there, Hayden was already at another place, busy with her next victim for them to examine.