Season 2 / Eloise Carter - "No Show" [Second Trial Projection]

Bow-wow

“Awooouh, nooo–!” Andrew’s hand stops him as he goes to head off after the Sheriff. He’s clearly a bit distressed by the sounds he could hear, but equally more distressed by the fact he was surrounded by cans of peas and that he didn’t know if they’d be expected to clean it or not.

But, figuring Andrew was stopping him for a reason, he makes no effort to go valiantly dashing off on his own. For once, he was thinking…

“Erm, do we need to go clean that up…?” He asks meekly.

Ellie Carter

Work fatality aside, the shift lead mutters something about assigning some mandatory training regarding not running in the aisles. There’s still work to be done and you’re one man down now. You’re pushed insistently along to the next task— cleaning.

The room you’re led to is the employee breakroom. There’s a small kitchen, just a microwave and fridge, two tables with chairs, and a couch facing an old TV.

“She’s not a secret agent.”
“Why was she always taking those long breaks then?”
“Oh come on. She was just slacking off.”

The group also walks into an argument between a small group taking over the couch, where both sides are conspiratorially smiling. Another one chimes in.

“If she was capable of doing anything else, I think she would have left by now.”
“She probably would have died working on the floor if she didn’t go missing.”
“She probably will. I bet she ran off with some guy and is gonna crawl back when she burns him too.”

The coworkers don’t mind the new hires that walked in, even if you tried to speak to them.

You’re set to work erasing signs that Eloise was ever here. Throwing out an old novelty pirate’s mug, buffing out an ‘Ellie’ scratched under the table, cutting her off the end of a group photo celebrating the 20th anniversary of the store, and cutting her out of the 25th, and the 30th…

While you clean, the conversation moves on from Ellie. It never came to a conclusion, but it doesn’t matter. Coworkers come and go, and this time it was Ellie. As you’re taking down a crude sticky note drawing, she comes up once more in their casual conversation and they struggle to remember her name.

Something is wrong.

Emmy | Akemi

Akemi frowns as she and the others are unceremoniously ushered toward their next duty, with one fewer member beside them. It wasn’t hard to understand what Ellie felt about her place here, already.

But surely the other shoe will have to drop at some point.

Unfortunately for Andrew and Luca, Akemi works as unenthusiastically as ever. It is plainly apparent that she had never needed to work a day in her life, especially not in this sort of environment.

She tunes into the gossip, cutting up the photos as instructed. As the gossiping employees begin to forget her name, of all things, she sets the cut out photo of Ellie onto the table as some sort of reminder.

“…I suppose she believed the world would move on and forget about her, unless she did something truly memorable.”

Bow-wow

The polar opposite, Luca at first seems far more enthusiastic, now he knows cleaning up the remains of Sheriff are the night shift’s problem. But very quickly, he starts to feel uneasy. The concept of Ellie thinking she was anything but memorable, when voiced by Akemi, has him halting in his tracks.

He drops the photos in his hands, and stares at the little cutouts of Ellie’s face.

Oh, don’t cry now, Luca. He frantically rubs at his eyes before the tears really get anywhere, but…

“This feels… wrong. It feels evil and terrible. Ellie’s nowhere close ta forgettable.” He seems angered by the concept she could even feel that way. But… it made sense, with how she’d acted up until now…

Andrew Edgeworth

Andrew seems as reluctantly diligent as ever when the three are shuffled along, at first, simply digesting what’s being shown. He considers Akemi’s guess with what Ellie told him. It’d check out some of the equation; he can see that being why she found her crew in the first place, at least.

“…it really is hard to imagine anyone glossing over her.”

But as the tasks escalate in erasing Ellie from existence, it seems Andrew has difficulty in continuing to carry them out - and not for lack of capability. When the order to cut her out of photos is given, he won’t even reach for the scissors.

Ellie Carter

Something about their defiance might strike a chord with Ellie, if she could see inside. The shift lead looks disturbed, but before it can push the wardens to instruct them again—

Something is off about this projection, since they stepped in the breakroom. The three here can sense it deep inside. It’s hard to name. It’s becoming harder to ignore or to assume it’s the same suspense or the anticipation felt in other projections. It’s not about what you’re going to see next. Then it suddenly feels clear, as if you’ve glimpsed something in one of the cracks. It is the dread of knowing that the glass prism you’re seeing Ellie’s life through is shattering as you’re in it.

Those glaring ceiling lights shut off with an electric snap. The room goes silent, the coworkers vanish in an instant. The only glow in the room comes from where the breakroom TV had sat on a cheap side table. As the three of you turn around, you see the glowing TV static as it sits upon a familiar sight. The burning projection chair, demon sigils and all, where Ellie should now be sitting outside of this projection. The room is bright again, radiating red and orange.

It shatters.

Through the crack in the projection, they can glimpse an array of red and blues upon the TV screen. Within they see the plain truth—

Ellie liked to carry cash. She liked the feel of bills. Flattening them out, sorting them, and their weird woven paper smell. She only ever joked to the new teens she trained that it was for when she was eventually on the run. Well, here she was. On the run.

Her friends were caught first. The lot of them were mostly brainrotted kids who preferred to get in trouble online than outside. They didn’t get away quick nor clean. Some of them had jobs, but the sort of jobs that people noticed quickly when absent. Not her. Ellie was a nobody. Always was and always would be. At most, a quirky background character to the people who came in and out of her life. A cautionary tale to not waste your life away in the middle of nowhere.

All she ever knew was how to give up and run away quick when shit got hard. That’s doing pretty good for her today.

She bought cigarettes at a corner store where they didn’t even ID, an old habit that she got bored of and dropped after her smoke break buds moved on. She takes a long drag around the corner of the courthouse, a lot less recognizable when she’s got the glass eye in. She waits, almost disappointed by the lack of attention anyone spares her.

Her friends and her fucked around somewhere they shouldn’t without realizing it. Or maybe some of them did realize. A few of them always did have more political beliefs than her. To her? It was just dumb fun after a long day of boring work. Nothing more, nothing less.

She still doesn’t think they did much at all to warrant life sentences. But that didn’t matter, hacking was a scary thing and someone had to prove himself tough on crime and declare her dipshits enemy number one. Her friends meant nothing to him, just another stepping stone in a career. He was taking their lives and probably couldn’t even remember their names without a paper in front of him.

If her life is going to be over, she at least wants to grasp it— for once in her damn stupid fucking waste of a life— and make it end with a bang. Yet standing here? Just feels like she’s waiting in the parking lot for the end of someone’s shift, waiting to give them a ride home. Yeah, she’s gonna give him a ride home alright, straight to fucking hell. She tosses a barely smoked cig to the ground. It’s time to run up those steps.

Her hands were already hot and sweaty. The blood that splashed on her didn’t miraculously wake her out of a stupor. She’s not sure she even felt it. She digs the knife in him once, already feeling someone pull at her arm, pulling her back. But she does it again before they completely peel her off, one more stab, this time at the neck as her aim is pulled off mark. Her ears are pounding, she only hears him cry out once before falling to the floor. She thinks she might’ve cried out too.

Nothing was gained. Everything had already been lost.

Ellie Carter

The projection ends suddenly, a sharp pain in your body as the group is thrown out into a familiar room. But unlike every other time you’ve woken up from these visions, the prisoner is absent from the chair. The constraints have been unlatched.

Ellie isn’t anywhere to be found within the projection room, but the door to the projection room— normally locked at this stage— is already thrown open. Now that you look around, Robert (or perhaps, as Andrew might have noticed, someone else) is missing too.

Bow-wow

OW.

Luca doesn’t like pain any more than the next guy. But he’s freaked out when they come back to an empty ass room, as if the fiery depths of hell weren’t far enough.

Another part of him is left wondering if Ellie would hate his boss as much as she seemed to hate the one she stabbed. Sure, circumstances were different, but… in a way, he definitely gets the sense she does pass the same sentiment onto the corporate bigwigs that mistreat their employees as well as she does to those who unjustly punish those she thinks don’t deserve it.

Either way, the fact that Ellie was here… wasn’t as strange. After all, he’d practically stormed out right after his own projection… but Robert?

His eyes are big, and he frantically looks around. “Um… where are they?” He asks, as if Akemi and Andrew are going to be at all more knowledgeable than him.

Emmy | Akemi

Even though Akemi had never had to work to survive, even though this job and this life she was seeing was so different from anything she had ever experienced, she could not shake the level of understanding she still felt toward Ellie.

Something about this all felt imprisioning. Unjust. She was invisible, her friends were overlooked, expected to stay quiet and obedient. And the inevitable explosion that results from a lifetime of such things.

Once they’re back in the projection room, only to find it remarkably empty, her expression hardens. Something is up, here.

“Let’s see if we can find them.”

She begins to head for the door, not sparing a further glance toward that chair, nor the wardens.

Andrew Edgeworth

Yeah, that…seemed much more in line with what Ellie said. Not just them, but what her ‘crew’ represented was truly all she had. No wonder she was so cavalier about being here or the idea that this was Hell.

Unfortunately for Andrew, the pain of being jerked out of the projection (as far as they know) isn’t enough to stave off the rising panic of seeing the fire again. That fuckass fire that seems to follow him everywhere. It’s not nearly as violent of a reaction as the first time, but he’s still too busy clutching his chest and trying to catch his breath again to answer Luca or follow Akemi. Just give him a bit, he’ll be right behind them!

MILGRAM

As you step into the hallway, everything looks wrong. The lights are out, but somehow you can still see in the dull, flickering red ambiance. The hall seems to stretch on forever, as if someone pulled the place apart like taffy. The voices in your head are louder than ever, but their words sound garbled and staticky.

Up ahead, at the end of a trickling trail of blood, lies Ellie Carter. The man who isn’t Robert kneels beside her, frantically trying to pull her upright– until he looks up and freezes at the sight before him.

There, on the other side of the hallway, stands the Jackalope.

Its eyes glint red with unseen light. Its cloak flutters in the non-existent wind. But worst of all, its shadow, darker than black, swirls across the floor in terrible flickering shapes, far too big for its size. Sometimes, you could swear it looks like a man… before it grows too many limbs and claws and teeth, then collapses into another of its indescribable forms.

The two escapees flinch and glance at each other, as if they heard something you didn’t. The man staggers to his feet, trying to put himself between Ellie and the Jackalope. As if he could make a difference.

You blink, and the Jackalope moves closer. You try to keep your eyes on the creature, but your head hurts so much you have to look away. There’s a blinding flash of red light, and the horrible noise of something sharp tearing through flesh–

When your eyes focus again, the hallway has returned to normal. All except for an unconscious Robert, lying on the ground in a small but growing pool of his own blood…

And Ellie, who has vanished without a trace.

MILGRAM

Projection complete!

The Wardens will judge as they see fit… but maybe you have a voice, too? [Voting is now OPEN.]

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