Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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DO NOT FILM, COPY, OR TRANSFER FOOTAGE TO ANY OTHER PLATFORM THAN WHAT IT IS ALREADY ON

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September 09, 2020 - 3:24 PM - Film 1

A teen’s face is shown on screen, covered in dirt and appears to have messy pink hair tied back into a ponytail.

“Is it on? Does it work??” A voice in the background calls out to the teen still tinkering with the camera

“I seems like it…”

“The red light is on! Oh my gosh, it works!” The camera is snatched away by a younger-looking teen with blonde hair, also covered in dirt and several scrapes.

“ Hello, virtual reality!!”

“Tommy, stop yelling!”

The younger teen—or Tommy—covers his mouth with his free hand and whispers a small “Sorry..”

Tommy then hands the camera back to the pink-haired teen, who seems to be inspecting himself in the camera.

“Why didn’t any of yous tell me my hair looked horrible?!!”

“Cuz who cares?”

The older teen runs his hand down his face with a dramatic groan, before turning around the camera to show Tommy.

The teenagers seemed to be in an abandoned house. Cabinets, drawers, anything that could hold stuff was opened and objects were scattered around. It looked like as if the place was just raided by the two teens.

“It isn’t useful but who says we can’t keep it? Let’s head back to Phil’s and show Wilbur, he’ll know how to check if there’s anything on this camera.”

Tommy nods and turns around to pick up a red backpack on the floor.

The footage freezes and stops.

September 09, 2020 - 4:51 PM - Film 2

The footage starts and is instantly met with another teen around the same age as the pink-haired one shown previously. However, he has curly brown hair and cracked glasses.

His eyes widen with slight panic.

“Oh shit, did I just start it?”

Pink Hair leans in from the right, only showing half of his face.

“Yeah, you did. See that light? That’s how you know.”

The other one pushes up his glasses with narrowed eyes.

“Well, it’s a different model than what I used to have but there were other videos in the home screen, so it’s used.”

“Can we watch the other ones?” Pink Hair asks, a hint of curiosity in his voice.

“Sure, the thumbnails look like they were only fishing though.”

September 11, 2020 - 8:11 AM - Film 3

The camera is flipped around, not showing the person holding the camera but revealing them to be quietly creeping through a house.

All the windows in the house were boarded up, not letting any light from the outside world. The place was lit up by candles and string lights instead.

The home looked lived in, cozy almost. There were beanbags and toys laid across the floor in a living room, books on a coffee table, and cans of food on shelves everywhere.

What stood out were the various unconcealed weapons lying around, like an axe leaned on a couch, or the pistol on a table.

The person recording rounded a corner, showing an adult with their back turned towards them and humming a tune. The adult seemed to be cooking something in the kitchen, a sizzling sound coming from there.

Whoever was recording then hurriedly lunged towards the adult with a scrawny hand up.

“BOO!!” The recorder screamed and the adult jumped back with a spatula in one hand and the other grasping his chest. Bursts of laughter erupted merely seconds later.

When the adult recognized the recorder, he visibly sighed in relief and shook his head to clear whatever fear out of his mind.

“Tommy, you can’t just scare people like that!” The adult scolded the teen.

“But it’s funny!” Tommy giggled, “Besides, you’re sooooo easy to scare, old man.”

The adult mutters something under his breath as he composed himself and continued cooking, vaguely sounding like he said “You kids are gonna be the death of me..”

Footsteps sounded from the background, and Tommy panned the camera from the adult to the brown-haired teenager, zooming in.

“Why do you look uglier on camera, Wilbur?”

The teen now dubbed Wilbur fake scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“At least I look better than you.”

“WHAT?!”

September 14, 2020 - 4:37 PM - Film 6

Wilbur places the camera on a table facing towards him.

He was sitting on a leather brown couch, colorful blankets thrown over it to make it less boring. There was a guitar next to him but he wasn’t holding it nor playing it.

Wilbur made sure to fix his hair and adjust his glasses before clearing his throat.

“So um…we’ve had this camera for a bit now and already recorded some stuff on it, but I suggested we use this to capture memories and stuff…”

Wilbur sighs, covering his face with his hands for a moment and slowly looking back up at the camera.

“So…I guess I’ll introduce you to us.”

Wilbur gestured to himself, “I’m Wilbur, as you might’ve already heard in previous recordings. I’m 17 and I love music and drama the most.”

“If you saw a messy, rowdy blonde kid, that’s Tommy. We found him on the streets and Phil couldn’t help but yoink him up, but it makes sense. Tommy’s only 14, he wouldn’t have made it out there with the virus alone.”

Wilbur paused to put some space between everything he says, like he was letting someone process what he was saying.

“Then there’s Techno, he has pink hair, hard to miss. He joined our little group a year after Tommy, he was a college student here before all the Blackout happened.”

“But guess what! He’s younger than me, surprisingly. Only by a couple weeks but that leaves me as the oldest and most in charge!”

The teen snickered to himself and then stretched to grab something that was out of shot.

A picture frame is what he grabbed and presented to the camera. It was a family picture of Wilbur himself but seemingly younger and next to two adults: the blonde man and a woman.

“The blonde old man is Phil, he’s my dad. And the woman is my mother…but she passed away long before the virus started..”

Wilbur looks at the picture solemnly, then puts it back where it was out of frame.

“Well, that’s pretty much it, we’re not that interesting if you ask me.”

“But we’re one of the only people not infected in this hellhole and I wish we could get out without having to risk our lives.”

Wilbur sighs again, but this time it was more sad than the frustration from before. It was mournful.

“I don’t know how much longer we can hold out for,” Wilbur’s voice is barely above a whisper, “We’re doing good but what happens if we mess up?”

The recording glitches slightly, skipping time in the recording to Wilbur leaning back onto the house, one hand rubbing his jaw in thought.

“I think I’ll end it here.”

Chapter Text

September 21, 2020 - 1:43 PM - Film 7

A person holds the camera as they walked down an empty, weed-ridden street. Stores and buildings around were covered with ivy and their windows more often broken than not.

The sidewalks were littered with trash and papers with big letters spelling EVACUATION written on them. The person recording paid no mind to any of the papers or messes, just kept walking with carefully placed steps.

The camera was then turned around to show the pink-haired teenager from before—a person we now know as Techno.

Techno looked to be on edge as he glanced over to the camera every few seconds. He wasn’t wearing normal clothes either. The teenager was wearing a medical mask over his face and the hood of a thick winter jacket was pulled up to cover his hair. Though strands of pink still poked out from beneath. Very noticeably an axe was strapped to his back, the head of the axe against his shoulder.

Techno brought a hand up to pull down the mask. It must’ve been cold since his face and nose was flushed pink.

“…I don’t exactly know why I’m filming this but I guess it’s better than talking to myself.” Techno kept walking, breathing evenly like he wasn’t bothered at all by his surroundings.

“It’s actually quite peaceful here, believe it or not..if you ignore all the bad things.”

“I’m more annoyed that I paid so much money to go to college only for the world to end after barely a year of going there.”

“But um..a couple days ago while out to go check out something, I saw an electronic store. We need a charger for this camera so I’m going to see if there is any left.” Techno glanced back at the camera as he explained.

“You might be wondering how we have power, but thanks to the amazing survivalist that is Philza Craft, we have a generator that uses solar power.”

For the first time seem on camera, Techno smiled.

Techno continues to walk for a few minutes more, no longer holding small talk with the camera. He seemed cautious always looking over his shoulder and staring down alleyways for anything hiding in their shadow. The outside was strangely quiet.

Then Techno looked into the shattered window of a store and froze. He raised the camera to be at eye level, then turned it slowly to face the window.

It was dim inside the store, but light enough to see the small pile of rotting bodies on the ground, void black blood oozing from underneath them. All the bodies had gray-ish skin with black veins all throughout their skin. It looked as if all of them had been injected with black venom and it just took over their entire life. Revealed flesh from skin rotting off only showed that their insides were just as black as their veins.

“That’s the Blackout Virus for you guys.” Techno voiced.

“I don’t know exactly what it is but, it’s some type of thing that just takes over the body and…” Techno paused and gestured to the decomposing bodies. “And when we can’t take any more of it, it kills you.”

The camera was turned back around as Techno speed-walked away from that store.

“They thought it was a pathogen at first. But no, it’s not that, it can’t be based on how it acts.” He took a deep breath, checking his surroundings again before speaking once more.

“It has to be a parasite, I can’t think of anything else it could be. Viruses don’t act like this, and fungus doesn’t just show no signs! There’s no mushrooms, no mold, no spores, nothing.”

“It has to be a parasite. It has to be”

September 22, 2020 - 6:30 PM - Film 8

“You really didn’t have to, Phil.”

“It’s your birthday, Techno! How could I not do anything?”

All four survivors were all sat in the kitchen. A recipe book was propped up on the wall next to the oven, flipped to a page on how to bake cakes.

Phil is half-way done decorating a cake with chocolate icing, a bowl sitting on the counter next to it full of the icing.

Techno looked at Tommy, realizing the whole thing was being recorded.

“I thought that was supposed to be charging, it was low last I checked!”

Wilbur snorted, “Cmon, it’s your birthday, deal with it.”

“But it’s such a waste of food and battery, we could’ve preserved that!” As expected, no one listened to Techno’s concerns. They just waited until Phil was done icing the cake.

“I hate you guys…” Techno mumbled, sliding back in his seat. The others only laughed.

Phil made a whistling sound when he was done, then placed the cake gracefully in front of Techno. “I’m gonna be honest, this is probably the best thing we’re gonna eat in a while.”

“My mouth is watering just looking at it..” Tommy said in awe.

Techno, however, made a disgusted face at Tommy. “Gross, this is my cake.”

“You just said you didn’t want it!”

“Well, now I want it because it smells amazing.”

Wilbur leaned against the counter, sliding the cake towards himself. “Children, children, calm down. Everyone knows the oldest brother gets the first piece of cake.”

“It’s MY birthday!”

The only adult in the room just stood there with a fond smile on his face, only intervening when the teenagers got a little too loud with their arguing.

The camera, unsurprisingly, got jostled around a bit since the youngest teen was very animated with his movements. It only stopped when Wilbur took the camera out of Tommy’s hands and placed it on the table to show all of them.

“Just cut the cake already!”

Phil laughed but grabbed a knife off of a rack, smoothly cutting the cake into four big pieces for all of them.

They didn’t sing happy birthday but it seemed like they didn’t need to. All of them just dug into the chocolate cake with idle chatter about how good it tasted after not having chocolate for so long.

October 15, 2020 - 10:26 AM- Film 13

“I don’t get why I have to keep doing this, school doesnt even exist anymore!” Tommy’s voice was loud in the open room.

Techno and Tommy sat in the living room first shown in film three, sitting on opposite bean bags while the camera was on the floor. A pile of books and papers were next to the two teens.

“School still exists, Tommy, and it’s so you actually get an education.”

“Who cares about that shit! The world ended, I don’t need an edu-cation!”

Techno sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The way you just said education proved my point…”

“Bullshit!”

“You can at least do simple geometry, Tommy.” Techno pushed a paper into Tommy’s hands but Tommy only squinted at it with a confused expression.

“…I don’t know how to do area.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out by myself.”

Pointing at something on the paper, Techno tried to explain how to do the area of a triangle. Based off how the teen was cringing at himself, he wasn’t doing a good job at it.

“I still don’t get it.”

Techno scratched the back of his neck in thought. “Well, um..let’s put it this way.”

The teen placed the paper on the floor and grabbed a pen to draw a rectangle.

“If you split a triangle in half diagonally, it creates a triangle.” Tommy hummed and Techno continued. “So you just do the area like it is a rectangle and split it in half.”

“Ohhhh..”

“This would be way easier if I majored in math and not English..”

October 15, 2020 - 7:03 PM - Film 14

From on top of a roof, it was easy to see the abandoned city. There were no street lamps lighting the ground below and skyscrapers were silhouettes against the fiery sky.

There sun was hovering just above the horizon, painting the sky in crimson, orange, and rose. Wisps of clouds that looked like cotton candy catches the light just perfectly to resemble glowing embers.

It was a wonderful sight in an empty, diseased land.

“We don’t get sunsets like these often.” Phil’s soft voice said from behind the camera.

“I don’t use this camera as much as they do but…this looked way too pretty to not remember.”

The sun slowly went down, and Phil recorded all of it. As the warm colors turned cold, Phil still stood there, even when there was more darkness than light.

Sniffles broke the silence.

“It awfully reminds me of Kristin…she liked sunsets as much as she liked collecting animal skulls for a reason I never knew.” Phil chuckled to himself.

“I’m almost glad she didn’t get to see what this place has turned into.”