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A Narrative Designer Dissects Generation Loss

(And Further Thoughts on Dollhouse-like Streams)

I keep saying how Jerma's ushered in an entirely new narrative medium and no-one's believed me.

This has been stewing in my mind for months. Ever since watching The Dollhouse Stream while going through a bout of just-got-my-second-covid-shot fever, one thought has carved itself on the inside of my skull. It is something I truly believe, and am baffled that more people aren't talking about.

Livestreams are evolving into an interactive narrative artform.

Generation Loss has only cemented this for me.

This is something I will keep yelling from the rooftops until my throat is sore, and this essay is my desperate attempt to get other people to start paying attention to interactive livestreams.

Livestreams as a Medium

By definition, a livestream is anything broadcast over the internet to a live audience. Over time this has generally fallen into a standard format thanks to the community of livestreaming centred around Twitch, of a livestreamer playing a video game with a live chat engaging in the experience in some capacity. This is to the point that someone who describes themselves as a "streamer" will come with the assumption that they play games for a live audience.

However, this is a flexible format, and doing out-of-the-box livestreams is nothing new. Stream team Radio TV Solutions are infamous for putting on weird, absurdist, and even genre-bending takes on playing games for audience entertainment. Some of their streams can be likened more to a live broadcast show, rather than a simple "gaming stream".

But, what we're focusing on here are interactive livestreams, and not just streamers taking an interesting spin on the format. Such examples are the likes of Charborg, presenting his chat with a question, with individual members voting on a response, to then be dragged at random into a literal court of opinion to debate the reason for their choice. He puts his audience directly in control of the stream and its direction, with both streamer and chatter having to "roleplay" into the experience.

Interactive livestreams even extend beyond Twitch's roots of gaming content. Alistair Aitcheson is known for his interactive art streams, where he creates paintings with direct input from the audience watching. Here, the audience decides what Alistair should do and how he should do it, whether that be drawing a black cat, only being allowed to paint with his elbows, or using mayonnaise as a pigment.

But, by far, the most famous player in this space is streamer and former TF2 creator (of which, as someone who's been a fan of his since 2012, am shocked that more people don't know) Jerma985. Over time, Jerma has become known for his "big streams", where he will do anything from broadcasting a fake family dinner where everyone but Jerma is an actor that have never met each other, to digging up rocks in the Nevada desert in collaboration with a local science institution, to organising an entire baseball game of half actors and half actual athletes, complete with a full live commentary.

In 2019, Jerma broadcast "The Carnival Stream", a defining work for interactive livestreams. Jerma played the role of a ringmaster, bringing his chat around various carnival games that could be played with Twitch chat-powered robots. Almost immediately it became a sensation, and put Jerma down as one of the most innovative livestreamers to date. It was something Twitch had never seen before. Truly, no-one was doing it like Jerma.

At this point, livestreams are a medium that are going through radical innovations. People are doing interesting things with the concept, experimenting with what you can and can't do, and pushing them into new and fascinating directions of entertainment.

How do you turn entertainment into an artform?

The Impact of the Dollhouse Stream

During my undergraduate, my professor told me one thing I've held dear to my ethos ever since. Discussing the ways narratives are woven into video games, he said:

"The difference between a toy and art, is that art is able to tell a story."

It's a measurement that's never failed me. Everytime I've looked at something, and wondered if I could call it art, I remember this. Art is made through narrative. And one thing I'm always fascinated by, is if a medium can tell a narrative uniquely compared to others. I develop games fulltime, and both my studio and solo projects are focused on how to most effectively tell a story through whatever means it finds itself in. Interactive narrative experiences are something I hold very dear.

When Jerma announced "The Dollhouse Stream" to broadcast in 2021, the hype was electric. By now Jerma's big streams had become an internet sensation, even to the point of being affectionately dubbed "The Superbowl for the gays". With the only information on the stream being something influenced by The Sims, taking place over three individual broadcasts, tens and thousands of viewers tuned in to watch.

What we saw was, I truly believe, the beginning of livestreaming turning into an artform.

The Dollhouse Stream took interactive livestreams in ways that have never been seen before, and it's an absolute marvel that it exists at all. It was brilliant, hilarious, and absolutely groundbreaking.

And, there was a plot.

It was a loose plot, and just served as a way to funnel more shenanigans on screen, but it existed and fulfilled the exact purpose it was set out to do. There were defined beats, a set way it was going to end, and the interactive elements were giving a unique experience on how we'd get there.

This is where I felt my fixation latch. This could be a new narrative medium.

I prayed, and hoped, this was just the beginning of streams like this.

An Analysis of Generation Loss as an Interactive Narrative

(And Other Parts that Caught my Attention)

Disclaimer: Any critiques in this section are given entirely in good faith, and have no bearing on the immense amounts of work by those who worked on Generation Loss. This comes from me believing with my whole heart that interactive livestreams could, and should, be judged as an artform, and thus subject to the same level of critical analysis.

My prayers for more were answered when Generation Loss was announced as a "live interactive horror show". I decided to go into the stream blind, for better or worse, only knowing that the stream was based around horror, and almost certainly would be set in its own self-contained narrative. There was supplementary media around it to hype the stream up and flesh out the story around it, but I wanted to see how well this could stand on its own, and if interactive livestreams really could be the new narrative medium I was hoping they were.

Episode One

was absolutely not what I was expecting.

The tonal whiplash I felt on realising this was being played as a comedy is not something I'm quite able to describe. 

This doesn't make it bad; far from it. In retrospect it's a perfect intro to the slow descent from light-hearted comedy romp that's almost self-aware into a serious psychological horror.

Being familiar with The Dollhouse Stream, the structure is almost identical, with an audience presented with a choice, going to a timed vote, and having the choice with the highest percentage play out in whatever ways it might. Between beats of the audience picking a choice and seeing its consequences, the downtime is filled with the streamers reacting to the choices, shooting the shit, or guiding the stream through scripted plot beats.

But Generation Loss takes it in a slightly different direction. The Dollhouse Stream is based on life simulation games, with the audience trying to keep Jerma alive (or, most of the time, deliberately starving or exhausting him to see what would happen), earning money to buy furniture, upgrading the house, and sitting back to watch the chaos they've inspired. 

Generation Loss, however, commits to the theme of an adventure game.  Ranboo wakes up in a cabin, realises they're stuck in there, and we're presented with the first choice of picking somewhere to investigate, and later learning that we have an inventory. There's no objective, beyond a vague semblance of knowing we need to get out, and having to explore to find out what we're supposed to do. As the audience we have direct control over his actions, and decide where Ranboo should search next, guide him through various puzzles, and help him out of precarious situations.

Once I settled into what I was watching, the stream was great. It kept up the pace, everyone was hilarious, played into its cheese, and was a solid take on an interactive livestream. 

But, the one thing I was hoping for wasn't there, with interactivity that was played with in interesting manners. It was fairly obvious that every choice would lead us to the same, if not a similar outcome. With The Dollhouse Stream, Jerma choosing to flirt with someone rather than simply talking to them could have huge impacts on where the day-to-day plot would go, and how everyone else responded to it in turn.

After some thought, I settled on this being episode one. Something new could be coming in the future, and there was no way the advertising banked this hard into horror to just be a simple comedy setup. This episode was a great start, made good use of interactive livestreams as a medium, and made me cautiously optimistic for the rest of the series.

Episode Two

Starting episode two, it took me all of three seconds to recognise the Saw inspiration and know exactly who would be behind it.

For those who haven't been following Jerma for long enough to cause permanent damage to your psyche, Jerma has an ongoing joke of putting on an audio filter and speaking like Jigsaw, running through bizarre or entirely mundane takes on Saw traps. This all stemmed from one House Flipper stream, which quickly spirals into an insistence that the Saw movies have an obsession with neurotoxins and nerve agents, which chat is very quick to disprove, and the legend of GYAS is born.

So as a Jerma fan, witnessing the culmination of a years-long bit, this was fucking hilarious.

But as someone looking to this series as a new narrative direction for interactive livestreams, I started to get a little concerned. It seemed to be hitting much the same points as The Dollhouse Stream, without really pushing into new fields on the narrative side. Perhaps "horror" was mislabeled, and "comedy horror" might have been a more apt description. Critically, maybe the angle I'd like interactive livestreams to be taken in wasn't the intent of this series. It was definitely enjoyable, but maybe I was looking for something that wasn't put there in the first place.

The moment that turned it around was this:

This is when Generation Loss became what I was looking for.

Everything about this moment works spectacularly. Charlie's almost immediate transition from silly jokes about toy racing cars to guttural screaming; the delayed, almost confused reaction from Ranboo; the cut straight back to the jokes, leaving the audience to digest what just happened, alone, with no-one on screen to help us through it.

This simple 10 seconds made the entire episode work. We now have a frame story. What we're seeing isn't reality (and as we later learn, is a literal show), and occasionally we see through the gaps in the curtain. Suddenly, the goofiness can be leant into. We can lean into it as hard as we want; there's no bearing on what's actually happening. Then you're sat there, laughing at streamer shenanigans and jokes, with a subdued sort of horror that you'll never know when the curtain will be pulled back again.

My main wish for this episode was that the curtain was pulled more effectively. Each streamer more than adds to the comedic side to the stream, then when it was pulled (or at least, when I assume it was), I don't think it landed as well as the operating table. 

Some examples are the deaths. Ethan's stands out to me, as one that gives me some of the most mixed emotions. Just as itself, watching Ethan die off-screen, only hearing his voice, while Ranboo and Sneeg stand and barely react to it in stark contrast to Austin's panic, works extremely well if you look at it as a scene out of context.

The problem is, I think it breaks an established rule. The rule being, as far as I can tell, that while the show is running everything is seemingly inconsequential. Once Ranboo wakes up, and both of us learn of the show masking everything, we're free to see the reality under it, making us more similar to each other than he'd like.

On the operating table, we're given a precedent for what green slime actually is. Now, any time we see it, it's in a very different light, and entirely recontextualises the first episode.

But now when Ethan dies, we... do see blood? I was under the assumption that blood was censored on the show in some capacity, and the glitches are the show breaking down and getting a brief slice of the reality of the situation. If it isn't, what happened with Charlie? Did this one death in particular make it through the censors, for some reason? Did it have something to do with the setting adjusted on Ranboo's mask before this room was hit? If so, it seems like a bizarre choice, both in-universe and for the narrative impact it had.

We return to some of these spots in the next episode. It feels like a missed opportunity to not play off these moments as a fake-out on the show-side, and then discovering they were actual deaths when the reveal's made. Instead we have people dying in gruesome manners, to then reveal they're... still dead. It's an alright reveal in the context of the line between reality and fiction being blurred, but one that could be much stronger.

All of this isn't to say that every death needed a moment where the line between show and reality is crossed. Vinny's death is a perfect example. It's a full Looney Tunes bit of being (literally) ragdolled across a room, with cartoonish fanfare, and then met with a hilarious demise of being hit in the head with an anvil. The reality of this... I like that being left to  our imagination. It's a good one.

The death I felt was the weakest was the combined deaths of Austin and Sneeg, getting crushed by a moving wall cutout Ranboo manages to fit through, of which, through many ways that are immediately obvious, could fit several people through with some amount of problem solving.

Was this... funny? Absurd? Are we supposed to laugh? It's played in a goofy manner, definitely, but this was just after Ethan's death. We already know these people are dying by this point, or at the very least grievously harmed, so having two people die in succession to then be immediately swept under the rug was odd. After Niki's death, which accomplished a shock death that's moved on from almost immediately very nicely, it felt like a backtracking in tone and redoing a beat we've already seen. 

On top of that, Austin reacted to Ethan's death, and then to the continued lack of reaction Sneeg and Ranboo have. I took this as Austin no longer being controlled in some capacity, so it doesn't make that much sense for Austin to die in a way that has a logical way out. Sneeg's does make sense, having been fully put under again. And going back to the point of the green slime, wouldn't it be much more effective if Ethan died in a way that isn't seen, perhaps only briefly and then cut off, to then see Austin freaking out over "nothing"?

I felt a bit of dissonance. Maybe this was the intent, but I don't think it landed in the right way. Instead of thinking if I should be concerned if that was a real death or not, like Niki's, I was more wondering if I was supposed to be thinking that. I was confused rather than horrified.

To give my fair dues, the moment with Sneeg realising where he was, and his attempted escape, was really good. It's a subtle moment at first, only shown by a glitch and Sneeg snapping out of an apparent fugue, to try to find his way out while pretending he's still under it. Our next curtain pull is Sneeg being dragged back into the show to be reset again while everyone's frozen, which I only fully caught on a rewatch as a literal pause of the show.

Another part of this episode that weakened it was something I didn't even realise would be an issue with interactive livestreams. With The Dollhouse Stream, if someone went on a bit of a joke tangent before moving onto the next part, it was fine. You're here to laugh and it only played into the strengths of the whole thing being a comedy setup. You're going from one thing to laugh at, to another thing to laugh at, and now you're on a detour for something else to laugh at that wasn't fully planned. The beats feed into each other.

But with Generation Loss, I was wanting everyone to move on so we could see the next horror beat. I wanted to be on the edge of my seat wondering what's going to happen next, and instead I was waiting for this line of jokes to wrap up. It was funny, because these people are full-time entertainers, but I didn't want to laugh right now.

Even with that said, I'm honestly not sure where that line should be. One part of me thinks this episode would be much for the better with some tighter pacing, but another couldn't bear to not have my heartstrings pulled by fulltime gay Austin's four children. Not even mentioning his one wive.

And wrapping up what I thought would be a small tangent before I get to the reason this essay exists in the first place, even with some tonal inconsistency and downtime between beats, I adore the details in this episode you only catch on a rewatch. For example, this tiny moment in the second to last room, where Ranboo is tapping out a morse code SOS signal with one hand, to then stop himself with the other.

Now that's sick.

Right; let's talk about why I'm here.

I was delighted to see that in this episode we got some neat interactivity that did have some narrative knock-ons. I was, finally, seeing what I came here for! Thrilling! 

The critical moment of interactivity is the carousel, at least for the narrative, of which we get to choose two people to save and bring with us for the rest of the episode.

Yes, of course, our choice to save Niki gets her killed, but isn't it nice to play a part?

 If we chose someone else, we could have got some pretty different improv sections or possibly new plot beats entirely. It's a good way to add some narrative branching while still progressing through a defined story with one ending.

The other interactive portions of the stream lean into one of my favourite parts of narrative design, of tying game mechanics to the story you're telling. Where the first episode takes on the style of an adventure game, the second is more akin to a gameshow. "Show" is the key word here, and the crux of the whole frame story this episode introduces. We're watching a silly little show, with some silly little entertainers, playing some silly little games that have absolutely no bearing on any possible reality. At all.

And since we're entertaining ourselves with something so mindless, not really caring about what's happening behind it, some equally mindless and pointless games would be a perfect supplement for this show. At first I wasn't a fan of these game sections, until I started to think about why they'd be put there. It's padding. A distraction. It literally covers the entire screen, demands your full attention by not allowing the story to continue until it's done, all to take your mind off what you're looking at and any discrepancies you might have seen before. It's not obvious, initially causes some friction, and really elevates the medium it's in once you start thinking about it a little deeper.

This is what I'm here for; this is the potential I saw.

With a very nice ending to round it off, and a full reveal promising the horror to run deeper as we continue on, my cautious optimism on how this would be wrapped up persisted.

Episode Three

Episode three is the tonal peak of the series, and by far the strongest episode. It strikes the perfect balance between humour and horror, and really shows the strengths of interactive livestreams as a narrative medium.

It starts almost immediately where we left off from the previous episode, tilting further away from comedy, and then sets us on a slow descent into absolute horror. This progression is done wonderfully. There's even a few sporadic jokes that land during the shift, before committing to it entirely by the ending.

My worry was the overarching story would not land. That there would be one huge lore dump explaining every detail of this corporation behind everything we just had to know. Instead, it's kept pleasantly vague with enough details for us to fill in the blanks from the previous episodes, and add some fantastic context that makes the whole series' worldbuilding stronger.

And a genuine question, did Charlie get acting lessons at some point? His swaps between goofs and terror are stunningly natural and lad's got some pipes on him that fully convinced me he was scared for his life.

Subtlety is the last thing I expected to be impressed by during this. Instead of having its messages laid out explicitly by one character going on a years-long monologue, they're told through environment, character reactions, and from details we've caught previously. Instead of spelling out a message on how streamer personalities are seen by others, you can show us a literal commodification of going live from derelict storefronts.

Cross-stream invasions will never get old. Ever.

This episode is where the series starts to make a fantastic use of every part of the medium it's in. Namely, as a filmed medium, between excellent shots of the live portions, especially during the chase scenes, to some near-seamless cuts to the prerecorded cinematics.

This is the first livestream I've ever said: "Wow, the cinematography's fantastic."

And hilariously, for the episode that ended up being my favourite, is the one with the least amount of actual interactivity. There's only two choices the audience makes, and both are extremely well-placed and well-done. It shows so well how it's not how much interactivity you shove into a medium that enhances it, but when and why you use it.

The first one is a subversion. Everyone loves subversions. We make a choice, but Ranboo now ignores us entirely. By doing so, and revelling in his newfound freedom, Ranboo condemns himself with the wrong choice.

Is it better for us to be in control of Ranboo? Should we be?

There's even subtle storytelling that doesn't come from an interactive moment directly. One happens during the final cinematic before the last choice. This one tiny moment, that I didn't even realise was there until seeing brief mentions of it in chat.

There's an exit sign that Ranboo misses.

And, critically, there were people in the audience who didn't.

Consider us, as we were controlling Ranboo before. There very well may have been moments Ranboo would have missed entirely if not for our choices to bring them there. If we were still in control, could we have sent them that way? Would we have been able to? Would it even be considered a freedom, if he didn't make the choice to reach it?

We're now forced to watch him head to one inevitable fate, just as he watched everyone before him.

The second, and final choice, is the climax of the entire series. Ranboo's final send off, after the show's had its run with him, is up to the audience to decide if he should live or die. Even after managing to be free of audience control, to the point of actively rejecting it, Ranboo is still beheld by it to the very end.

There's even a narrative element to seeing the decision shift in real time, told entirely by the audience watching. Chat immediately floods with attempts to save Ranboo, the knee-jerk reaction on being faced with the option to kill them. Then, as the announcer details the actual fate of being left alive, with Ranboo's slow realisation that they'd consider it worse than death, the bar slowly creeps over to the right, flicking back and forth over the 50/50 mark.

And then, as the choice times out, deciding to give Ranboo an apparent mercy, chat is immediately flooded with laments on if it was the right call as the credits roll.

Absolutely stellar.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the first ever narrative-heavy interactive livestream. It's the best one because it's the only one. There's wanes and waxes, with parts that didn't land, some that very much did, and an experience that I still enjoyed immensely, if not mostly on the novelty of the medium, and the obvious heart that was put into every part of it. Quoting myself to a friend minutes after the stream ended:

"i feel like i just watched the second movie ever made"

 And, should Ranboo, Jerma, or literally anyone else pursue narrative-heavy interactive livestreams further, there's so much that could be learnt from and expounded on into something incredible.

That excites me. That really excites me.

Interactive Livestreams as a Narrative Medium

This begs the question: where do we go from here?

I'm pulling away from Generation Loss specifically, and now asking to the question of narratives in interactive livestreams in general. Could we consider interactive livestreams a new narrative medium? Or is it a subgenre of another type of storytelling, with much the same considerations and impacts?

What we're really asking, is this: how does an interactive livestream tell a story through audience interaction? One of the best ways we can do this, is to start making comparisons between interactive livestreams and other mediums, and seeing what lessons we can and can't learn from them.

So, with this in mind, what medium is one of the most famous and wide-spread types of interactive media? What medium is an intersection of many others, and is able to use their strengths and limitations as a story demands? What medium has decades of experience in narrative agency and responding to the choices of someone engaging with it?

Video games.

The Narratives of Interactive Livestreams

Let's analyse The Dollhouse Stream as we would a piece of interactive fiction. It already has many terms describing narrative structures and systems, and the progression of The Dollhouse Stream fits quite nicely into them.

We're going to jump to the first choice made in the house itself in episode one, where the "game" begins proper. There's intricacies happening right up to that point, but we'll discuss what they are in more detail shortly.

The audience's first choice, between working out, going outside, and using the toilet, is exactly the one you think it is. Ignoring the innate comedy of piss, a choice is made, some amount of content happens, and then the stream continues on until the next choice.

This is what's known as a "bottleneck", where a choice branches out, and then collapses back down to a main branch. This main branch, typically dubbed "the golden path" (GP), is the path with the most content, the path a designer tries to guide the player down for narrative satisfaction, the "win condition", or other similar denotation. How the GP is defined exactly depends on the type of story being constructed.

So here's a question: what's the GP of an interactive livestream?

This is where analysing interactive livestreams in this way can only take us so far. The thing is, this idea of branching out and bottlenecking, implies that after the bottleneck, the stream would progress the exact same no matter which choice was made. This is decidedly not true, for many apparent reasons that I'm sure you can see. In an alternate vote where, shockingly, chat decides to not make Jerma piss, he would have had to make very different jokes.

Also, looking at this diagram might imply that the entire stream is put on hold when a vote takes place, like in interactive fiction when a choice is presented and the game effectively pauses until the player picks one. Audience choices are actually running asynchronously to the stream, and the streamers can fill the gap with improv until a choice is decided. Things can even happen mid-decision that has an impact on how the audience votes. Screaming "Please let me die", perhaps.

Instead, the narrative of interactive livestreams put us on an entirely different kind of story.

One type of narrative system is known as "attribute-based stories", sometimes called "quality-based stories". Where a block of narrative content is reached, and based on the choices made during it, an attribute is applied and carried through the rest of the story. These could range from obtaining an item, getting level experience, sating a survival need, changing relationships with other characters, or a literally limitless list of others.

How attributes are used, and when they're applied, is down to the designer. Imagine you go to a pub with the attribute "had a bad day at work". You enter, make some choices, and leave with the attribute "got into a bar fight". Once you return home, you could mention the attributes you gained during the day with your roommate, with some special content playing out based on it. Perhaps "put on your favourite shirt this morning" and "got beer spilled down your shirt". This is an admittedly crude explanation of attributes, and doesn't even begin to look at the narrative complexities it allows, but hopefully gives you a good idea of how they work.

Generation Loss, likely from its initial influence from adventure games (of which, structurally, is almost one in the same as interactive fiction), and later game shows, doesn't stray too far from a branch and bottleneck format. But, this doesn't stop attributes being used effectively, both by streamers playing off improv and making some minor changes to the narrative, even with the ending being predetermined.

Conversely, attributes make up almost all of The Dollhouse Stream's narrative. Every choice, furniture, interaction with other characters, and even audience reactions can be thought of in terms of attributes. One of the most well-known moments of the series comes from something developed almost entirely on attributes:

Jerma and Emilia.

This thread starts once the audience decides to call for "sexy maid service." We're given what was sure to be a brief joke, and are greeted at the door by a maid played by Ludwig, later finding out he's playing the character of non-binary maid Emilia. 

The audience is immediately smitten. They love them. A choice is made to flirt with Emilia, and the rest is history.

Their relationship continues with a date invitation, Jerma sleeping through it, awkward interactions, development with the rest of the cast. And, in a culmination of all of this, Jerma cheats on Emilia with Death, with one of the most infamous scenes in the series bringing up every attribute this relationship's gained up to this point. Jerma calling Emilia a "stupid maid" out of context, the missed dates, every insane occurrence that's happened in this house, all comes out in this one moment, and it's just as impressive as it is the funniest shit I've ever seen on Twitch.

You don't know how high they can fly.

Emilia was intended to be a small gag. Instead, through audience popularity, and building a whole story on nothing but attributes, they became a critical character of the series. By playing into each other, the audience and streamers have, very effectively, created an entirely new plot thread for the stream to follow, which has had sweeping effects on the entire narrative.

This is a level of interactivity that games could only dream of. Sure, you can always comment on the player picking up the green sword instead of the red, but can you comment on their emotional response to that decision? Their thoughts on not taking the red? If we become fixated on it, are we then able to reference it as a cute nod or critical plotpoint, and change the future of the game based on it? If the audience doesn't care, can you drop it entirely, and bring in something else you have prepared?

That level of narrative fidelity is nigh-impossible to hit in a video game. There's a reason games that get even slightly close to emulating this, like Disco Elysium, are revered as technical marvels.

Let's consider how this could be applied to another technique used by games to deliver as much interactivity as possible, while cutting back on the amount of assets needing to be created. Rather than scripting entirely new locations and environments for every choice made, choices are instead put back on the characters. The same general series of events take place, and what changes is how the characters react to them. They can change the narrative based on if they're the one to perform an action, if they do an action at all, how their relationship with other characters pans out, and, if the story calls for it, if a specific character survives.

In interactive livestreams, these characters are no longer AI reacting to scripted events you meticulously plan out to land. These are real, actual actors who can respond, adjust, and create new content on the fly based on previous attributes, with the only real limit being their skill as an actor. Most importantly, they can improv their way out of something going entirely off-rails, and possibly make something even better than the original plan. 

This was starting to sound familiar to me. What other medium have stories created through a two-way relationship between separate parties? What other medium requires everyone involved to be fully playing in the headspace of the story, and be willing to bend, and possibly break it?

TTRPGs.

An interactive livestream manages to create the hyper-personalised story of a TTRPG, with choice mechanics of video games, combined with the visual spectacle of theatre and film.

And that's thrilling.

Structuring the Narrative of an Interactive Livestream

Let's temper our excitement for a minute, and bring our attention back to the concept of a GP. A GP, as we saw earlier, isn't really a structure we can apply to interactive livestreams. Even if we meticulously plan out everything to the minute detail, one improv'd line could throw the entire thing off. And if we do want to make something to that end, we could just, you know, make a scripted show. It doesn't exactly fit the spirit of an interactive livestream and what it could do.

So as much as interactive livestreams can lean into being a live medium and using improv to carry it, they still need to tell a story, especially if it wants to lean heavier into the narrative side over improv comedy. 

I'm proposing a term of "golden nodes" for interactive livestreams. This takes the idea of a golden path, but shifts it to better fit how interactive livestreams come to be. A golden node is a piece of content that must be hit at some point. Either because they are the ending state of the stream, enough preparation has gone into them that it would be a catastrophic waste of money to not show it, or has critical plot beats that forwards the story being told. How we get there (in terms of making a complete story, and less so on how good it will be) is irrelevant, and where something entirely unplanned can crop up.

We could try running through The Dollhouse Stream and categorising golden nodes, but this is something you can't really define with something so heavily reliant on improv. What we might think was a golden node might have been improvised on the day, and something we think might have been made on the spot had weeks of planning. Sometimes it's obvious, like organising a bear attack complete with a bear costume, or having a whole lighting setup for a party, but when so much is made up on the spot, it becomes much harder to define which is which. And often, it's a bit of a pointless exercise, and more of a fun fact you hear in the BTS.

On the other hand, as you would expect from something much more focused on telling a pre-planned story, Generation Loss is much heavier with its golden nodes compared to The Dollhouse Stream, and much easier to guess which were planned and take stabs at what was improvised live. I actually wanted to take a stab at mapping the whole series out, complete with attributes gained, used, and estimating which nodes were golden, but...

I've spent far too long on this already.

A few notes I did make on the deaths in episode two, for the curious:

Niki was voted by the audience as the first choice to be saved. If the any-person voted was the one to trigger this, Austin, Ethan, or Niki could have died first.

Vinny's death is a cinematic dependency. Unless multiple videos were shot for it, Vinny had to die at that point.

Ethan's death could have been anyone

I'm personally convinced Sneeg was railroaded to survive until the end, given how well his reset state plays off Ranboo's new emotionless performance.

Keep in mind, this is entirely from my own perspective as someone watching from the outside, and approaching it from the perspective of a narrative designer trying to maximise unique outcomes. I've had to make several assumptions here and I could be entirely off-base.

Despite my crashing out, mapping the livestream out like this shows how rail-roaded episode three is, to the point you can actually draw a solid GP for it. It also shows that, even with many golden nodes to hit, episode two manages to have quite a few moments that could have gone differently based on audience choice. At least, if my assumptions are correct.

So, this leaves me with a proposed set of terms for discussing interactive livestream. Interactive livestream are built around "nodes"; chunks of content that have been explicitly planned out and prepared for before the stream begins. Some of these are golden nodes. Golden nodes could be anything, but are things that must be hit before the stream is over. Other nodes may be optionally hit, and entirely unplanned and improvised content can happen between any nodes. During unplanned segments and nodes alike, everyone (and, really, everything), can gain attributes, which can be brought up at any time to the story's discretion.

Maybe these terms are useful. Maybe they aren't. We'll have to wait and see.

The Limitations of Interactive Livestreams

As much as it's fun to speculate what could be, we, unfortunately, live in a real world with restrictions and limits of what we can do.

One of the most obvious ones is budget, and with the amount of moving parts an interactive livestream has, budget becomes a vital topic to remember. But budget isn't just a matter of money. Consider, if you had unlimited money, and were writing a novel by yourself, how fast could you work? Let's say you write a solid 2,000 words a day, and to you, a novel is complete at 80,000. In this example, you're going to live to 80 before peacefully dying of old age, and start your novelist career at the ripe age of 20.

Even if you had no worries about having a roof over your head, feeding yourself, never getting sick, never taking holidays, and sacrificing every day of your life to writing novels, not even accounting for slowing down as you grew older, or editing, publishing, and the entire escapade on getting your work noticed by others, you would be able to produce 547 in your lifetime, with half a manuscript left over. 

Now consider this when you do have a limited amount to spend and a deadline to hit, and now you're writing something that could have five novels worth of storylines, involves visuals, audio, music, technical implementation, and now considering interactive livestreams specifically, set design, filming requirements, human needs of catering, sanitation, and shelter for your cast and crew. 

Suddenly, two novels of content compared to five looks much more appealing. Interactive narratives not having limitless branches isn't a matter of not wanting to put everything you've got into a project. It's a matter of production realism.

Time is a resource, and one you need to spend just as wisely as money.

This is something very important to remember for interactive livestreams. It's also something to consider for ways we could cut out the expensive parts of one. Could we create one that doesn't have a fancy camera setup? Do we need camera visuals at all, making something akin to a live narrative podcast? Do all interactive livestreams need to last several hours, or can we reduce the scope of time? It wouldn't have the exact same spectacle as a several-hour live filmed show would, sure, but that doesn't mean we can't make impactful narratives with it. Do you know how many eggs we've cracked with 5 minute twine games?

Limitations are also not just a matter of production. We need to think about limitations of a medium itself. A novel, with just text, doesn't have the liberty of showing you something in a visual format, and has to rely entirely on words to communicate the same information. Of course, you can bend and break the rules a little and include pictures in your book, but that starts to cross the line into other formats. Now we're not just a written medium, and have other considerations to make as well. And, generally, writing a paragraph of description is quicker than drawing a picture. The real challenge is making a paragraph just as impactful as a picture in the same spot.

For interactive livestreams, its limitations are a bit tricker to define, being an intersection of so many types of media right off the bat. I'm woefully undereducated of the limitations of filming and live shows, and unfortunately cannot speak to how they would shape how a story is developed. But, what I can do is talk about possible limitations in narrative interactivity. There are a few that jump to mind immediately.

As much as we can talk about audience choice in interactive livestreams, this begs an interesting question, of what happens to the choices the audience doesn't pick. In a game, this is pretty simple. That choice is blocked off, it may have consequences, and the player lives with the choice they did make.

However, games are not performances. They're pieces of media that can be replayed on-demand. If you want a different experience, or want to see what that choice you didn't make actually did, all you have to do is start again.

An interactive livestream does not have this liberty. Once the livestream is over, it cannot be replayed by the audience for a different outcome. Every choice is final, the narrative responds to it, and whatever outcome the then-live audience chooses is the one that's the final outcome for everyone else watching the vod.

In a game, there's often a discussion about how much it should branch around a choice, especially if that choice leads you on an entirely different path with unique content. Someone might not be interested in another run, and unless you really put replayability forward as a selling point, or make it a central mechanic of the game, it's a high gamble that a lot of the content you put a dear amount of effort into will never be seen.

For an interactive livestream, that isn't a matter of content that won't be seen on one run. That's content that won't be seen, period, and is effectively discarded after the stream ends. If we have a story with two immediate branching paths, that's two interactive livestreams worth of budget, for only half the content being delivered.

Looking at this diagram, we can see what content someone sees on one run of a typical branching game. There's a lot they saw, but much more that they didn't. Imagine that this is now the planned content branch for an interactive livestream. Imagine that each one of those nodes is the equivalent to a room in episode two of Generation Loss, and how many uncoloured nodes there are in comparison to red.

Are linear bottlenecked choices the only outcomes for narratives of interactive livestream if we're not depending on improv? Is there an upper limit to how much "true" branching you can prepare before you start hitting the limits of your budget? Can there be an interactive livestream that manages to give several ending options based on the path taken, or will it always have to collapse back down to one alone, or an ending with one diverging choice in the final moment? Does this strip some audience agency, knowing that in spite of their choices or "playing along", they will never be able to change where the story is going, or only making one difference right at the end?

Equally, however, the audience will never know. With a game, an inconsequential choice can always be scrutinised on a replay. Finding out that if you choose to shoot someone, you always miss, and gives you the exact same outcome as letting them live. In an interactive livestream, to the audience, that other choice is permanently gone as soon as we decide to let them live. We will never know what shooting them would have done. It's a kind of choice funneling that games could only dream of.

Compare this diagram, showing a heavily bottle-necked story in a game with multiple runs:

To this one. The same story, now adapted for an interactive livestream:

Interactive livestream are already making use of this. Consider the first choice in episode three of Generation Loss. The scripted event is the audience picking one code, and Ranboo picking any other to forward the plot. The "true" code is chosen when the audience picks it, and Ranboo picks a different one to trigger the security lockdown.

In a game, the first time we play this would have much the same narrative impact, but not so on the second. If we pick a code, enter it, and find out on the first run it's wrong, we remember this on the next. We can try to cheat a little and pick the code we know is correct from the previous run, only to find that no matter what, whatever we pick is the incorrect one. Replay value is a little cheapened.

In an interactive livestream, however, as far as the narrative goes, we will never know anything different. Our first choice is the only choice. The yellow code is always incorrect.

Will audiences wise up to these moments and start to tire of it? Will we get good enough at disguising them and striking a balance between actual interactivity and putting the audience on rails? Who knows. We have to do it and find out.

Here's another thing I've been wondering in terms of limitations, of the kind of narrative setups you can and can't do with interactive livestreams. I mention this, because currently the two story-heavy interactive livestreams we have are based around the concept of an audience directly controlling a streamer, who (and in the case of Generation Loss, not at all times) is aware that they're being controlled and broadcast live.

The Dollhouse Stream takes it in a comedic direction. The entire inspiration of the stream is based on The Sims, with Jerma directly taking mannerisms and inside jokes from the games. Jerma is fully aware of the chat controlling him, and at times openly antagonistic of choices made or not made, but always plays into the character and follows whatever decisions the audience makes.

Generation Loss, as discussed, is the horror inversion of this. Ranboo starts blissfully unaware of the audience controlling them, and the fact this is even being broadcast, and plays into it much like they were making the choices themself. Soon after he learns the truth, he's terrified and defiant of the audience previously controlling him, which marks a point in the narrative of things turning south.

It's pretty interesting to me that both of these are built on the audience being in direct control of a streamer as an extant character to itself, and the streamer fully aware it exists, at least in different capacities. It's like we're already having some meta commentary on the whole medium before it's even fully hit its stride.

I'm certain there's ways to create interactive livestream that don't immediately jump to this as how the audience interacts (the first thought takes a similar thread of video games, where the audience "is" the person they're "controlling", and as a character they and the audience are one in the same), but I also posit this. Does the audience need to control a person? Could they control the environment a streamer is in, and possibly the stream itself? Could the audience be an additional character to themselves, not in direct control of others present? Could we hotswap control between different people on the fly? There's room to explore what the audience actually controls and why.

This is also said with an understanding that both The Dollhouse Stream and Generation Loss are, in varying capacities, commentaries on livestreaming and impacts it has on both streamer and audience. This is excellent, and I'm certainly not calling it a dead-end for interactive livestreams, but I am saying that this medium has potential outside it.

And something else I do wonder about, is the tone of narratives in future interactive livestreams. They, obviously, have their roots in streamer culture and the personalities that have come from it. Each of these personalities, being comedic entertainers, always bring their own jokes and riffs and are predisposed to making people laugh from observational humour. It begs the question, will every interactive livestream have some kind of jokes and tangents to it, and all have some form of improv comedy? Will there be ones that manage to break away from this entirely?

But then I think of some criticisms of video games, of saying that things are too "game-like". Which, to me, is similar to walking into an Italian restaurant and complaining about the amount of pasta. Maybe this is similar. I think we simply don't have enough interactive livestreams to call it.

We need to see more.

We're on the Frontier of a New Way to Tell Stories

This is the point where I fully convinced myself of something I'd been suspecting from the first ten minutes of The Dollhouse Stream. By trying to analyse interactive livestreams as interactive fiction, I was met with caveats and exceptions. As a TTRPG, more caveats. As a standard video game, more. This wasn't a simple matter of treating it as one medium, and keeping in mind one adjustment to make it work. There were sweeping knock-on effects that didn't match with any existing interactive media, and forced me to rethink how to approach it from the ground up.

This is how, I believe, interactive livestreams sets themselves apart from other forms of interactive narratives, and into their own category entirely. They are simply something unto themselves. There's many questions here, and they can only be answered by those who will strike out to try them, and I eagerly await those who do.

We are currently seeing, in real time, a new form of interactive media being developed right in front of us. And one I believe, with the right hands and direction, could easily ascend to a point of being considered art through narrative.

I see nothing but potential. There are so many ways to take this medium and I am begging more people to put their hat into the ring to see what the true limits of it are beyond theory and speculation.

But, it needs that direction. It needs people who understand choice in media, and for the love of god, it needs narrative designers at the helm. My obvious bias as a fulltime game designer and solo narrative dev come through here, but there's no other medium that's produced talent better equipped to tackle this.

I'm right here. Someone hire me.

To which my question is: if you're in the games industry, and not instantly smitten by interactive livestreams as a new medium for storytelling experiences, what the hell are you doing?

And if you're not, and read this for whatever reason you did, I hope you can see what I see, and are as excited as I am.

[obriengf]

Empatheia ✽ Stiles Stilinski x Reader

Summary: The trio investigate the meaning behind Scott’s dream, while Y/N searches for her own answers from Derek Hale.  Words: 9.8k Warnings: swearing, awkwardness, not proof read ✽  Series masterlist  ✽  

Chapter Three: 𝐏𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 /Part 1

Exhausted was beyond an understatement when it came to the way you were curled up against the pillows of your bed; textbooks were found discarded by your feet and the soft glow of your bedside lamp created a gentle yellow haze over your face. You were lacking peacefulness in your slumber, as seen in the way your heavy eyes clung with scrunched edges and your pursed lips that quivered every so often in time with a disrupting element of your dream. Your new life didn’t account for worriless sleep and easy days, neither did it give room for you to take a deep breath and embrace somewhat of an eventless few hours. No, your life was now branded by a thick fog and clouded by shadows, everything of which you knew was now questionable, and the people that you once assumed had since been altered by new elements and revelations. This life was difficult and sceptical, and maybe that’s why you just simply couldn’t get enough. Valerie was more observant that you were giving her credit for - always watching, always paying attention to how you’ve changed so dramatically over the past couple of weeks. She took notice in your new company and how conversations were now hushed when she was near, even how you took more frequent journeys in the neighbour’s old blue Jeep rather than her car when it was offered to you instead. She saw the more prevalent darkened circles that tore down your eyes more and more each day, and how your face refused to settle when you managed to sleep. But what she especially discerned the most, was the way you flinched at any present emotion that was, at first, not of your own. She couldn’t quite tear her gaze away as it settled with discomfort over your sleeping stature – reminded of the nightmares that would plague your dreams and how they twisted their way into a scar that she hoped you would never have to bear. History repeating itself, she thought.

The only sound that could be heard between the walls of your house was the gentle creak of a door closing behind an anxious Aunt. She wandered with soft steps downstairs, hiding herself in the furthest corner of the kitchen. You were out like a light, but she couldn’t risk being overheard as she flicked through her phone, selecting a contact that she hoped she wouldn’t need to call upon. Valerie took a deep breath as it rang through, repeated tones sounding against her ear that built uneasiness with every loop.

“Hello?”  The voice was rough, raspy as if interrupted from a sleep stage. Valerie nearly felt bad for calling at such an hour, until she remembered the reason.

She drew a deep breath, eyes closing momentarily as her head lent back against the fridge door, “You told me to call you when it was happening again.”

“Who-? Valerie?” A sigh was released in reply, shuffling through the receiver following next. The voice stilled for a second or two before it returned, “I’m guessing you’ve noticed it too.”

“Noticed it? It’s hard not to notice! It’s starting to control her life!” Worry got the better of her as your Aunt snapped, mentally cursing at herself at the volume she didn’t intended on amplifying.

“- Val, calm down.” She didn’t how the other voice remained so steady, but it prompted her to draw a deep breath and lull her head back once more. The voice was losing its roughness; becoming more alert, more awake, “We’ll figure it out, we’ll help her… she won’t reach the same fate, I promise.”

“Is that a promise you really can keep, Derek? From what I know, she’s just like her mother, and you know damn well more than anyone else how that played out…”  Valerie was growing protective – more so than usual. It didn’t help in the slightest that you are the spitting image of your mother, and every time your Aunt closed her eyes, all that she can picture is you in that hospital stretcher instead, covered in blood and grasping at the thin thread of life that happened to slip through your mother’s fingers. Destiny had a funny way of making things happen, but she would sell her soul if it meant that you didn’t have to end on that same fate.

Derek sighed once more, agitated at his inability to guarantee safety and happiness. That’s all he wanted for you, but the chance was growing slimmer by the second. “I’ll look again, alright? My mom’s journal has to be here somewhere.” The man glanced around the charred remains of his family home, flickers of candlelight creating shadows among the dilapidated structure, “She would’ve hidden it, the fire… it would have been safe from the flames. That’s something I can promise.”

“Just look out for her, please, Derek.”

He wouldn’t find that difficult – you were nearly glued to Scott McCall’s hip now and that young wolf was tying with you for first place on his list of things to stress about most. Kill two birds with one stone. Derek chuckled lightly, “Won’t be an issue.”

You would hardly deem yourself as ready when you heard three loud rasps of knuckles against the wood of your front door. Slightly charred toast half hung from your filled mouth, hands busily working to tie the laces of your sneakers, and you were glad that you weren’t hardly uncoordinated enough that you couldn’t multitask. Valerie snorted in amusement as she watched you; the same expression she wore when you were bumbling down the stairs not even twenty minutes ago, cursing about how you nearly missed your alarm. Not that she could blame you, really – your Aunt heard the softened whines from the nightmare you were having last night, but knew better than to wake you. Some things just need to be sought through instead of interrupted.

The knocks were heard again, and it made you groan, peering to your Aunt as she coddled the coffee mug against her smiling lips. Your eyebrows rose, voice muffled, “Drrr.”

“What was that?” She questioned, fake obliviousness in her tone.

“Drrr. Kh new get uh drrr?”

She nodded as she snickered at your reply, “Ah, would you like me to get the door?” And your eyeroll was enough of a confirmation before she sauntered to the front of the house, smiling as she shortly became face to face with the neighbour’s kid.

“Mornin’ Valerie.” Stiles chirped, hand straight as it pulled away from his forehead in a welcoming salute.

Your Aunt simply copied his gesture before moving to the side, allowing a space just large enough for Stiles’ frame to fit through. “Hello, Stiles. C’mon in”. The dainty steam from her mug continued to dance over her face, prompting her to blow gently for it to waft into the hallway. She peered over her shoulder at the boy, lips curling at the corners, “You might as well just have your own key at this rate, seeming you’re here every day.”

“Oh, I already have one.” The boy let slip, his tone quiet as it absentmindedly fell in a mumble. It was loud enough, however, for Valerie to stop and twist her torso just enough to nearly face him. Her eyebrow rose in question and Stiles couldn’t hold back the awkward chuckle that he released, “Ya know, for emergencies!”

Valerie hummed, seemingly not convinced, but found the subject better to leave as it was. She always knew that Stiles Stilinski was an odd kid – he was too smart for his own good, but he exercised it in ways that made her wonder how Noah was still clinging to threads of sanity. His attention deficit disorder made him very vigorous, and she was used to seeing him as a young boy ride his bicycle up and down the street for hours, just to release said energy. He was constantly on the move and never seemed to slow down, using his intelligence to cause harmless mischief and drive his parents completely crazy. Valerie had also always known that Stiles Stilinski was a good kid. He was thankful for his parents, polite when his mother used to strike up conversations with Valerie in the driveway, helpful when asked for assistance, and overall kind-hearted. Your Aunt saw this more after your mother died – when you moved into the bedroom across the fence from Stiles’, he became an instant friend. She saw him care for you and pick up pieces that continuously shattered. He was your rock, your comfort, and he eventually became your light.

So, in truth, Valerie would always view Stiles as that weird kid next door, but she also held him highly for the large heart he carried so well.

 “I’m ready, let’s go.” Your voice interjected from the living room, bag slung over your shoulder and just enough concealer to cover the purple rings that pulled down from your eyes. The attempt to cover your exhaustion and lack of peaceful sleep was good enough to the unknowing – but Valerie and Stiles’ smiles fell just slightly, the truth clear as a sunny day, as they briefly scanned over your face.

It was your cue to shift your gaze to your scuffed sneakers before a cough cleared your throat and you pushed between them both. You knew that they provided you with looks of concern, and somewhat even surprise, but the last thing you wanted was the be the centre of some very unwanted attention. It was best to escape the awkwardness before it settled. With an arm effortlessly linking with your neighbour’s, you pulled him toward the front door with a goodbye call over your shoulder to your amused Aunt.

Slight anxiousness bubbled in Valerie’s chest, and you could’ve sworn you tasted it briefly on your tongue. She called after you, “Have a good day, and be safe!”

It wasn’t too long until you had crawled into the backseat of the Jeep, Scott slipping haphazardly into the passenger side you nursed for a mere ten minutes beforehand. He immediately dropped his head to the window, a guttural groan easily filling the space around you all and creating weak condensation against the glass. Stiles’ thick brows rose to his hairline in question as his eyes caught yours through the rear-view mirror – all you could do was shrug in response.

“You, ah…” Stiles started, reversing out of the McCall driveway, “You all good there, Scotty boy?” He was met with muffled speech, the glass once again fogging due to the inaudible response. Stiles pursed his lips, “Can you repeat that? Away from the window?”

Another groan was exhaled, “Couldn’t sleep last night.”

Stiles hummed, his head dropping into a nod of acknowledgement, voice quieting as he flicked on the indicator and peered down the street for morning traffic, “Seems to be a common thing around here.”

It was difficult to not conjure a bit of remorse for your werewolf friend. Sleeping wasn’t something that you could call a prize possession during these times; your eyes, even now, still fluttering from lack of slumber as you tried to hold back a yawn. You sighed, leaning in between the two front seats, “What happened Scott? Did’ya have a bad dream?”

His head lulled to the side, rolling over the headrest so lazily until his gentle gaze peered into yours, “I-I don’t know… it felt so real, whatever it was…”

Silence enveloped the Jeep for a brief moment; aside from the clutch grating whenever Stiles changed gears, and the morning tunes of the radio murmuring weakly. You could see the stress stem so easily from Scott’s eyes and it made you worry, trauma peeking through due to whatever horrors he saw.

Your lips curled in as your face softened, an attempt at holding back your sympathy was made so that it wasn’t mistaken for pity, “Well, how about you start with what your dream was about?”

“I was with Allison, we were… looking for somewhere private –“The boy started, his view tipping to look out the windshield as the Jeep navigated Beacon Hills’ suburbia.

He was interrupted, however, as you held up your hand and scoffed “I swear, Scott, if this is some kind of wet dream, I will hit you - “

Scott jumped, the accusation prompting his body to jolt awake before his jaw was dropping and his tone spiked highly, “-NO! No, let me finish” The young wolf’s head shook with incredulity, ignoring Stiles as he chuckled beside him. Scott’s breath drew deep, “We were at the school, just hanging out… and maybe making out, b-but that’s not the point!”

Stiles’ sounds of amusement died quickly, his eyes rolling, silently mocking his friend until he caught Scott’s judgemental glare beside him, “What? I didn’t say anything!” He muttered as the Jeep edged closer to Beacon Hills High. The sunlight was sharp; beams of gold flickering through the windows, filling the cabin of the Jeep with the Californian warmth, whilst also creating sparkles of mischief within Stiles’ delinquent wink into the rear-view mirror. You always wondered why his middle name wasn’t troublesome.

“Anyway…” Scott dragged, “We were both on the bus, and everything was great… so great, but then I just – “ His lips pursed as discomfort clouded his gaze, “I started to turn. I tried to control it but I couldn’t. I yelled at her to get away, but it wouldn’t stop!”

You could sense the anxiety. It was a common occurrence with Scott now – the uncertainty, the worry, the panic. He was bathed in it, and that’s how you knew that whatever went on within those night terrors of his must’ve been the worst case of bad. You looked up in time to see Scott’s head in his hands as was slipping lethargically from the Jeep, surrounded by fellow students as they made their way across the carpark. Stiles was next before he flung his seat forward for you to vacate.

As you swung your bag over your shoulder, Stiles turned to the side as feet directed him to the School’s entrance, his hands warming in his jacket’s pockets with a once furrowed brow now rising in question, “So, what? You bite her, or something?” He was wearing obliviousness like a new trend, completely unheeding to the trauma clawing into Scott’s mind until he saw the despair dragging down his friend’s usual lopsided grin, “Or… hang on, did you kill her?”

The two boys pushed open the large doors; your now intrigued senses heightening as Scott exasperatedly shrugged his shoulders alongside rounded worried eyes, “I don't know! I just woke up… and I was sweating like crazy, and-and I couldn't breathe!” He visibly shuddered and it provoked a chill to run down your spine at the small crack within the boy’s voice, “I've never had a dream where I woke up like that before.”

You wanted to reassure him – you’ve woken up like that, plenty of times. It started when your mother died and had reoccurred recently much to your dismay. It sucked, and it physically hurt, and it got to the point where you couldn’t recall what was real or fake anymore. Dreams were bleeding into nightmares, and they were determined to make themselves known whilst you were awake. You desired to reach out to Scott and tell him that he’s not alone, but any seriousness was so easily removed from the situation as Stiles stopped in front of you both, back to the remainder of the corridor.

“Really? I have.” Stiles replied for you, and for a miniscule moment you considered that he would be earnest and thoughtful toward Scott. But instead, his hands fumbled into strange gestures until he was making his point very cringe, and very clear, “Except it usually ends, uh… a little differently.”

“Oh my god.” Your eyes rolled quite distinctly as you pushed past Stiles, words muttered with incredulousness. The boy snorted, rascality etching deeply across his features as he watched you venture forward with Scott hot on your heels.

Scott groaned, new images flashing through his mind, and they were beyond not wanted, “A… I meant, I’ve never had a dream that felt that real…” He began, turning to look at Stiles with utter disgust contorting his expression, “And B… never give me that much detail about you in bed again!”

With a nod of his head and whispered affirmation on the edge of his breath, Stiles managed to take a deep breath, the corners of his mouth dropping as he worried about how Scott will react next, “Let me take a guess here – “

“No, I know. You think it has something to do with me going out with Allison tomorrow… like I’m gonna lose control and rip her throat out.” An accusatory finger was directed in Stiles’ direction, Scott sneering at the offence his friend was wearing too well.

Stiles’ mouth gaped, lashes fluttering uncontrollably against the sharpness of his cheekbone. The boy stuttered, “N-no, of course not!” He exclaimed, hands held in front of him. Your lips curled slightly at the twitch of his eyes as Scott stared intensely at him, scepticism also driving the jump of the young wolf’s brow. Stiles conceded, too easily, “Okay, yeah. That’s totally it.”

Stiles peered to the other side of Scott as the wolf sunk his head in glumness, managing to catch your sympathetic eyes. You weren’t sure how to help besides providing a few words laced with wannabe optimism, simply hoping that Scott can’t see past how hard you were trying to appease him, “Hey, come on, Scott. It’s gonna be fine, alright?” You smiled as you lent in closer to him, softly nudging his side with your elbow before ducking to catch his view. Your voice quietened into a whisper, “And personally, I think you’re handling this pretty freakin’ amazingly.”

“You know she’s right, Scotty.” Stiles chimed in, his arm leaning on Scott’s shoulder, “And it's not like there's a Lycanthropy for Beginners class you can take.”

The atypical sarcasm prompted Scott to raise his hands, the dark brown of his irises squinting, showing a forlorn expression in his frown. He appeared pitiful before a sudden change made his head raise, his eyes widening as if a metaphorical lightbulb lit up behind them, “Yeah, not a class… but maybe a teacher…”

Stiles scoffs almost immediately, “Who, Derek?” His words didn’t hold much meaning until he properly looked at Scott, all seriousness remaining in the young wolf’s face. Stiles spluttered nonsense, baffled by what he had heard before his hand whacked the side of Scott’s head. You cringed, trying to ignore the strange looks from your classmates before you heard Stiles’ voice pipe up again in exasperation, “You’re forgetting the part where he got him tossed in jail.”

Scott’s tone matched Stiles, of not with more urgency, as small cracks settled in the base of his words, “Yeah, dude, I know. But chasing her… dragging her to the back of the bus…” He sighed, a hand rubbing tiredly at his face, “It felt so real.”

You pursed your lips as the three of you continued walking the halls of Beacon Hills High, a heavy heart weighing down your chest as sympathy began to flood your system – an emotion, that for once, was purely from your own conviction. You looked to Scott, “How real?”

He drew a deep breath and shrugged, “Like it actually happened.”

Stiles reached out in time with you as you both pushed open the large doors at the end of the hallway, exposing the rear of the school, and greeted unexpectedly with crime scene tape and sirens. The three of you froze in time with the students pushing out from behind you, shocked and slack jawed as you looked at the horror scene that plagued the bus bay. One of the yellow school buses was tainted with a thick red spray and the back door just barely hanging from its hinge after being torn off. There were deputies ushing away growing crowds, and a well-dressed member from the Sherriff’s station taking crime scene photos of a torn back seat, with white cushioned stuffing spilling to the floor.

It was straight off the set of a Hitchcock film, and much to your despair, a perfect description of the nightmares that plagued Scott only a few hours ago.

Stiles gulped, “… I think it might have.”

You almost didn’t feel Scott’s hand as it secured around your bicep until the nausea began to light in your gut, the bubbling of acid and fear rising to your throat. Slowly, you peered to the side, and although your friend wasn’t looking back, you knew that this was Scott needing you to feel how he felt.

“She’s probably fine…” None of you truly knew at this point – initially unsure after Scott expressed his nightmare, and even more after the scene you’d just witnessed outside. Stiles’ words rang clear enough to hear, but Scott was far from listening as he pushed anxiously through the crowded halls, his thumbs racing as he sent multiple messages to Allison.

His teeth were clenched and knuckles white from the grip he had on the small device, “She’s not answering my texts, Stiles.” Scott stood as high as he could, attempting to look over the other students in case he spotted Allison. His features contorted frantically, heart hammering in panic, frustrations expressed through small grunts.

Stiles sighed as he tried to reassure his friend, “Look, it could just be a coincidence, alright?”

“A seriously amazing coincidence.” You muttered, not realising that you voiced your thoughts, and the defeated sarcastic tone that came out with them. You stopped, guilty as you passed over Scott and focused on Stiles and his lack of amusement. His bow raised, and you shrugged, “What? I’m just saying.”

“Guys! Just help me find her, okay?” Scott intercepted, evidently exasperated to the point where you swear he nearly reached for the pocket that once housed his asthma puffer. You all turned and scanned the hallway, beginning to make your way past students as you tried not to veer too far from one another. Class hadn’t started yet, and you were only feet away from her locker, but the girl was nowhere to be found. You pulled out your own phone and sent off a brief text, one to say good morning and ask if she wanted to meet for lunch – surely, much more toned down than what you imagined Scott’s anxious messages to read.

“Do you see her?” He eventually asked after the crowd was recycled, bringing in a new lot of students as they gathered their books and moved toward their first period.

You sighed in time with the slumping of Stiles’ shoulders, your voices in unison as they relayed the bad news, “No”.

Fingers dragged through shaggy brunette locks with jittery movements, and soon, Scott’s feet were moving just as fast. He was on autopilot and the spontaneous need to bolt made it hard for you and Stiles to follow him. He ducked and weaved, using his enhanced speed to escape the ruckus of the situation. It had only been mere seconds before he had disappeared from your sight.

You could feel Stiles grasp onto your shoulder, digits digging into the soft material of your jacket, their strength tense as his own state of worry started to increase. He didn’t ease the further you two moved but it was too late to catch a glimpse of Scott – the halls were too congested. He groaned as he pressed his chest to the back of your shoulder, “Where is he?”

“He might just need time to chill, Stiles.” You replied, trying to lead the boy to a space that was much more capacious.

He grumbled against your ear, “Chill? Do you remember the last time he freaked out like this? He nearly ripped our faces off with his little wolfy teeth.” Which was much more real than you’d like to admit, but instead you just huffed, a deep exhale, remembering the events clearly as they happened in the room just down the hall. It was absentminded as you reached to your shoulder to take hold of Stiles’ hand, squeezing tightly as you pulled him through the doors of the girl’s locker room. The boy made a small sound of awe, “How is this nicer than the boy’s one? Mm it smells nice.”

Nearing first period usually meant that nobody would be in here for hours – a space baron, vacant, and especially private. Thoughts ran wild in your mind on whether what you had planned would work, you could feel from near, but could you do it from afar? It made your chest fill with your own anxiety now, a thickness that was heavy in your throat and a throbbing in your head. Turning slowly, you glanced up at Stiles, who had finished examining the foreign room and whose large brown eyes had already settled on you with much curiosity.

Your lips pursed hesitantly, “I’m going to try something, okay? But I need you to just… trust the process.”

Stiles’ thick brow rose, perplexed by the process you were referring to. He didn’t get the chance to ask as you dragged him to a bench that sat between two rows of lockers, sitting in time with you as he watched a deep shaky breath being drawn. He could see the way your eyes creased with a lack of assurance and how your hands were rung the same way his did when he fidgeted out of uneasiness. He smiled softly, sympathetically, before he took your hands in his and held them gently in your lap.

This pulled you further to him as the apprehensive flutter in your chest began to die down. You drew another deep breath, this time, much steadier as you began to calm from Stiles’ hold. You sighed, “Scott can hear things, right? Far away. He can do this thing where he cuts through everything else and just zones in on a particular voice or sound. Like on the lacrosse field last week.” Stiles nodded, understanding what you were saying but not where it was leading. It prompted his head to tilt slightly to the left after he twisted his frame, now directly facing you front on with his legs either side of the bench. Your tongue darted out quickly to lap at your lips, “Well, what If I can do that too… but with emotions. What if I can feel Scott?”

“You’ve never done something like that before, how do you know if it’ll work?”  The boy questioned, eyes never leaving yours as he observed the desperation to try. His shoulders slumped, thumbs absentmindedly rubbing against your hands as they remained within his grasp. He could see your concern, as bright as day.

“You said it yourself, Stiles. Last time he was this worked up, he wolfed out on us. We don’t know where he is but I can at least try and see if he’s okay.”

Stiles agreed immediately – the line of his lips steady and straight as he nodded his head again. He wanted to help Scott, but he’d be lying if he said that he wasn’t the tiniest bit curious just how far your new quirks can go.

You smiled as you pulled your hands away from his, sitting them flat on your knees, “I need you to be the lookout, and wake me if anything goes wrong.” When you had the go ahead from Stiles, you breathed in through your nose and fluttered your eyes closed.

You didn’t know if this was possible, or how to start it off, but you tried to focus purely on Scott. You thought about the distress he felt only moments earlier and how upset he was in the Jeep this morning. You thought about when you felt his anger on the Lacrosse field, and even more so when he held Stiles up against the wall in his room – how you voice made him stop.

Scott.

Stiles jumped when you opened your eyes, only to be met with that familiar white glow. It terrified him but he couldn’t look away, mesmerised by their tone and ethereal qualities that made you appear so oddly celestial. He waved one of his large hands in front of you but elicited no reaction, and it made him wonder just how this was truly working.

“He’s turning.” You said softly, brows furrowing, feeling the red-hot course of adrenaline that settled in your chest whenever you felt Scott turn before. It was as if he was clenching your own teeth as your jaw began to ache, worried that fangs were going to protrude. The inability to see just what you were focused on only made the feelings stronger. It wasn’t until your fist flew back and the muscles strained with such force that you knew it was getting too much, like Scott hit something, hard. You could barely hear as Stiles asked if you were okay, nor did you notice how he was quick to hold your still balled-up fist and inspect your knuckles. With a shaky tone, you whispered, “Scott, stop, come on… take a deep breath, snap out of it.”

It was a relief when your heartbeat began to drop as instant calmness loosened your tense muscles and relaxed the thumping in your head. You closed your eyes and smiled, sitting in disbelief that it worked, and that your friend was okay.

“Y/N?”

Stiles’ voice rang clearly, a soothing sound as it coaxed you back to consciousness. Your lashes danced over your cheeks for a moment as you gathered yourself, gentle as they opened to see Stiles shaking his head with a wide toothy grin.

He chuckled, “I can’t… you just did that, I mean… you’re amazing –“

“Attention students, this is your principal.” The PA system suddenly sounded, shaking you two out of your bubble as your gazes focused on the speaker. The announcement continued, muffled and crackly from years of going without a system update. You both furrowed your brows as you tried to listen, “I know you're all wondering about the incident that occurred last night to one of our buses. While the police work to determine what happened, classes will proceed as usual.”

You turned to Stiles in perfect unison, a look of disappointment dragging down your features as your bottom lip jutted out, “I can’t believe they’re still making us go to class.”

Stiles hummed, slapping his thighs as he stood from the bench before throwing a hand in your direction. His fingers wiggled, an invitation as he insisted on helping you up, “Yeah well, I wish that was the least of our worries.”

“You’ve got first period with Scott, right?” You asked, to which he nodded as he offered enough strength to pull you into a standing position. “Make sure he’s okay. It’s crazy just how much his body goes through when… it happens. Poor guy – “

“– your eyes glowed again.”

“What?” Your bag slid onto your shoulder, body twisting as you looked over your shoulder at Stiles. You pushed out your lips, voice hinting at tones of disappointment, “My eyes were closed; all I saw was darkness the whole time.”

“No, they glowed. They were bright… shining. Just like the other night at the Hale house.” He replied with so much excitement, hands moving in explanation. “It was actually pretty awesome.”

You swallowed the lump in your throat. The more you use your abilities, the less you seem to understand. The unknowing was a never-ending fog and when you tried to decipher an explanation for the things that you could do, it only ended in getting lost even further – unlike Scott, he has a label, he was a werewolf. There was lore and expectations, books after books with detailed descriptions. But you always came up short, and the optimism that Stiles carried so well on finding an answer was just ever so tiring.

A huff passed your lips, “Can we talk about this later? We have homeroom.”

“Uh, yeah?” The boy replied, deflating immediately as you brushed him off. He didn’t look away as you made your way from the room; eyes wide as they followed you, trying to contain the pity he felt so strongly in case you could sense it. Stiles knew this was hard on you – whatever this truly was – but his determination would never falter. Never for you.

Leaning against the metal doors of some lockers on the first floor, you continued to stare at your phone screen – the text conversations fuelling the thoughts that run over again in your mind. You were in a daze; inattentive, distracted, engrossed in contemplations that you simply couldn’t control. It was the reason that you haven’t been sleeping and now it was taking over your daily life too. There was futility in focusing on one thing at a time. But how could you, with the added dramas from this morning.

You made an excuse to leave your class early when Stiles told you that they recovered a body from the bus. The ambulance rolled him out, and he was believed dead by your friends until the man jumped up in fear. Stiles told you that Scott was even more shaken than before and that second-nature feeling of dread had returned to the pit of your stomach. It was the softened call of your name that broke you from your pondering, to which you glanced up to be met with the two boys – one with a smile of sympathy, and the other with all of the devastation in the world sitting upon his shoulders.

“This probably isn’t going to help, but at least he isn’t dead.” You spoke quietly, your hand sitting upon Scott’s shoulder as you ducked to catch his eyes. You could see Stiles shrugging, hands sinking deep into the pockets of his hoodie as he claimed that he tried that, too. You moved until you could properly see Scott’s large brown eyes and a sigh pushed passed your lips, “Okay, at least it wasn’t Allison.”

“No, but someone got hurt, because of me!” Scott groaned, his face falling into his hands as you began to gently rub at his back.

Stiles piped up as he began to guide you all toward the cafeteria, attempting to bring some sort of contentment to his best friend, “We don’t know for sure that it even was you.”

“This is why I need Derek’s help. I need to know about this dream, what I did last night... I need to know what the hell is going on.”

You were first to the lunch line, trying to muster a smile as you accepted the assortment of food for the day. Looking to your side, you could see Stiles trying to push Scott along as he began to wallow once again in his distress. This was too much for him to handle, for anyone to handle, and you were starting to wonder if Derek really would have the answers for Scott after all.

“But dreams aren’t memories.” Stiles spoke again as you all were huddled together, locating an empty table. Stiles took his place first as you sat opposite him, Scott slipping into the seat next to you.

The wolf sighed and placed his backpack in the chair on his other side, “Then this wasn’t a dream.” He rubbed at his face again, anxious movements as he let out his frustrations, his voice cracking in what you could tell was plain exhaustion, “Something happened last night, guys, and I can’t remember what”.

Taking a bite of your apple you watched as your two friends spoke back and forth, a tennis match between scepticism and rationalising. It would be more amusing to watch if the topic of conversation wasn’t literally revolved around life and death. Stiles rolled his eyes, his body leaning back in his seat as arms crossed over his chest, “Uh huh, and what make you think Derek even has all the answers?”

“BECAUSE –“Scott began, already overwhelmed as his voice rose in anguish before the silent scolding from Stiles prompted him to settle down. He looked around bashfully, hoping that nobody could hear as he continued with a hushed tone, “because… during the full moon he wasn’t changed. He was in total control, while I was running around in the middle of the night… attacking some totally innocent guy!”

A coo pushed through your lips, a sort of sigh, as you lent slightly on the table to face Scott, “You don’t know that.”

But he shook his head, putting his metaphorical foot down, “I don’t not know it.” He stopped; eyes moving in thoughts as he bit roughly at his bottom lip, tugging before breathing out in defeat, “I can’t go out with Allison. I have to cancel.”

“What? No, you’re not cancelling, okay?” Stiles shifted forward in his chair, his crossed arms now settling on the tabletop. With a serious gaze, he looked at Scott, voice beginning to nag, “You can’t just cancel your entire life!”

You intercepted, a hand thrown in Stiles direction to agree with his sentiment, “He’s right, we’ll figure it out.”

“ – Figure out what?” Her voice was one that you didn’t expect, especially as it was followed by her sitting next to Stiles on the other side of your table. Lydia smiled brightly as she saw you, her fingers lifting into a small flutter of a wave, and you were happy to smile warmly back at her. You just hoped that she didn’t hear anything else before she made herself known.

Your greeting with your friend was interrupted by odd noises, fractured syllables and stammering sounds as Stiles grew nervous from being so close to his crush. He was at a literal loss for words as his mouth gaped and he smiled with bashful rosy cheeks. You couldn’t help but roll your eyes.

“Just, uh…” Scott jumped in, trying to fill the void that Stiles left when answering Lydia’s question, “Just homework.”

She took that as a good enough answer before looking to the other students that began to sit around the table with you, starting small friendly conversations that you and the two boys felt out of place within. It prompted Stiles to incline across the table, close enough so only you both could hear, his brows furrowed and tongue lapping at his lips, “Why is she sitting with us?” It was a question that you didn’t have an answer to as you shrugged in reply, side-eying Scott that did the same thing.

You smiled at Danny when he sat on Stiles’ other side, his greeting followed by a reciprocated grin and small nod of his head, and when you looked around nearly every seat was occupied by students that you didn’t have very much to do with. Harley slipped into the spot on your right as Allison settled next to Scott. It was a strange experience, and you managed to share your expressions of confusion with Stiles as he pouted from your conversation being interrupted.

“Get up.” Jackson scowled at the head of the table to a poor student, and you were close to banging your head on the surface in front of you just by the sound of his infuriating voice. Today just wasn’t your day, or Scott’s, or Stiles’.

“How come you never ask Danny to get up?” The kid argued, only maiming his case to stay.

Danny smirked as he bit into his apple, “Because I don’t stare at his girlfriend’s coin slot.” He spoke, matter-of-factly, and most of the table chuckled as the kid left in embarrassment and Jackson took ownership of the seat. You wished that your table has just been left alone.

You were looking between Scott and Stiles, thinking of an excuse for you all to leave, until Danny began a conversation about the morning events, “So, I hear they’re saying it’s some type of animal attack. Probably a cougar.”

“I heard mountain lion.” Jackson added, poking at his food with a disapproving glare.

You wanted to correct them both, but a disgruntled Lydia beat you to it with an annoyed tone of voice as she kept her eyes downcast, “A cougar is a mountain lion.” Your space was quiet as others observed her oddly, Jackson looking to her with a blank stare, and it provoked the redhead to tilt her head and speak once more with an airy high-pitched voice, “… Isn’t it?”

Her boyfriend scoffed and you started to imagine what it would look like if you just knocked him off his chair with a well-thrown water bottle aimed straight between the eyes. If only.  Jackson groaned, his voice uninterested, “Who cares? The guy’s probably some homeless tweaker who’s gonna die anyway.”

“Actually…” You flicked your focus to Stiles as he peered down to his phone, turning the device around for everybody to see, “I just found out who it is. Check this out.”

It was coverage from a local news outlet, the reporter seen speaking before the screen flashed to video footage taken this morning at the school, “The Sheriff's department won't speculate on details of the incident but confirmed the victim, Garrison Myers, did survive the attack. Myers was taken to a local hospital where he remains in critical condition.”

“Wait, I-I-I know this guy…” Scott shuffled in his seat, gasping at the recollection of the name, “When I used to take the bus, back when I lived with my dad, he was the driver.”

Everybody faded away as you, Scott and Stiles shared a pointed look between each other. With every new article of information, the tension would grow stronger, and it meant that it was gradually getting more difficult to piece together the puzzle.

Your sombre expressions were ignored as Lydia sighed loudly, indicating her boredom in the conversation as she examined her perfectly manicured nails, “Can we talk about something slightly more fun, please?” You watched as she jumped, gasping loudly as she looked across to Scott and Allison before sitting her chin atop her now folded hands, “Like, where are we going tomorrow night?” Their lack of reply made you wonder if they were on the same page as Lydia, so she took a deep breath, and spoke slower to clarify, “You said you and Scott were hanging out tomorrow, right?”

Your throat felt tight, and you knew that it certainly belonged to someone else. Leaning forward you could see Allison’s worried eyes, and as if on cue, the fluttering started in your chest as she grew nervous. You could noticed as her hands rung under the table, and Scott wasn’t any better as his shoulders tensed alongside the clenching of his jaw.

Allison coughed gently, a clear of her throat before chuckling nervously, “Um, well, we were still thinking of what we were gonna do…”

You recognised the way Lydia’s eyes lit up – how they glinted with eagerness, rascality, good intentions with a twist of trouble. She was eying off Allison and Scott and you knew that it wouldn’t end as ideally as they’d like. Stiles seemed to be thinking the same thing as he caught your focus, a joint wide-eyed look expressed between you both, a small smirk tugging at his lips when he caught sight of Scott’s apprehension of being put in the spotlight.

“Well, I am not sitting at home again watching lacrosse videos, so… if the four of us are hanging out, we are doing something fun.” Lydia’s tone was frank, the flow of her words spoken so candidly and confident with no room for dismissal. It was the total opposite to Scott’s ambivalence as he sat there, stunned, and slack jawed. Your space silent enough to hear a pin drop.

“H-h-hanging out? Like… the four of us?” He stammered, immediately turning to Allison and watching as she covered up her disappointment with a large drink from her water bottle. Scott lowered his voice and raised an eyebrow in question, “Do you wanna hang out? Like, us, and… them?”

A small, choked sound from Stiles forced your eyes away from the trainwreck in front of you to watch him cover his mouth, clearly taken aback by the scene you were both agonising over as mere spectators. He looked at you once more with those wide caramel eyes as you both shared a silent conversation – consisting mostly of ‘what the actual hell is going on right now’.

Allison chuckled in discomfort, but shone a lovely smile nonetheless, “Yeah, I guess. Sounds fun…”

“You know what else sounds fun?” Jackson interrupted, annoyance exuding from his voice and his features contorted into an unimpressed expression. He held his fork in the air, shaking it with his words, “Stabbing myself in the face with this fork.”

You thought that Stiles was moments away from spitting out his water as he took a large gulp; hoping it would stop him from interfering in whatever was going on in front of you, his eyes rolling dramatically and hand motioning wildly. Lydia, completely unaware of the interaction between you and Stiles, reached for the fork clutched in Jackson’s hand as she sent him a scowl at his rudeness.

She huffed, a manicured finger pointing in her boyfriend’s direction, “Well, how about bowling? You love to bowl.”

Stiles shook his head violently as he tried to gain Scott’s attention, but the werewolf simply just shrugged as he felt helpless in the situation. This made you drop your head to your hand, groaning softly under your breath. You changed your mind – this alone was way more dramatic than the events this morning brought you all.

“Pft, yeah. With actual competition.” Jackson continued his tirade of needing to be the best with a loud huff, his tone purposeful to deride the others.

What you didn’t expect to come next was Allison to speak with such enthusiasm, confident to hide the offence that the jock left them with. “How do you know we’re not actual competition?” The girl sat up straighter, causing her brunette curls to dangle over the back of the seat as she turned to Scott, hope sparkling in her eyes, “You can bowl, right?”

Scott shrugs, uneasiness dripping from his words, “Sort of…”

“ – Is it a sort of, or is it a yes?”

“Yes.” Your friend was quick to reply to Jackson’s patronising tone, his frame matching Allison’s as he sat tall and courageous with a smile curling his lips, “In fact, I’m a great bowler.”

You have never facepalmed so fast in your life.

Your afternoon classes went smoother than you expected. It seemed that everything that could be deemed eventful happened before the end of lunch, and the rest of the day went past as if everything was, dare to say, normal. You managed to filter out the background chatter about Mister Myers as you moved around the school halls in between your classes; only hearing the odd pieces of gossip speculating different predatory animals and scenarios that led to his attack. It was hard to pay attention to the different opinions when you knew the truth, or the somewhat truth, as you wholeheartedly believed that Scott was innocent in this matter.

You didn’t realise you were so distracted – staring out the window of your math class with such obliviousness – until you felt a tap on your shoulder. It provoked a small jump from you as your arm dropped to the table and your eyes growing wide and alert. As you turned, a concerned-looking Scott McCall was leaning toward you with his grip slipping to your bicep, squeezing with reassurance.

“You good?” He quietly spoke to avoid detection from your teacher, and you were glad that you both decided to sit toward the back of the classroom today. You replied with a soft nod of your head, unconvincingly, but your friend let it slide as he offered a thin-lipped smile. You could see from your peripherals that he seemed to be in an internal battle as he sat back into his seat, deep thoughts scrunching his brows and slack-jawed as if he was trying to think of what to say. You’d be lying if you didn’t find it somewhat amusing until he turned around to face you, his lips pursed in question, and momentary awkwardness in his eyes.

“So, uh… I think you were in my head earlier. Ya know, this morning…”

You hummed in reply, pen inattentively tapping against your page, “I honestly didn’t know how far I could go with it, but yeah, I guess so.”

Scott nodded as his focus flickered toward the front of the room and back to you when you were clear to continue talking, “It was weird. Like, I knew you were there and I could hear you, kinda… it was quiet but I knew it was you. I knew you were trying to calm me down.” Scott sighed under his breath, his hand running through his hair, “Reminded me of the first full moon, and you – “

“ – I thought the same.” It was a night that still made you uncomfortable; the first time you saw pure anger exude from Scott, how his eyes grew dark with harmful intentions despite the immense struggle he faced to keep them at bay. You remembered how he was trying to stop the anger and hold onto his humanity, but the moment he held Stiles against that wall… when he threw that chair at you… you realised that what Scott McCall had become was something way beyond what you could properly fathom at that time. Even still during this time.

Scott understood your choice to cut that memory, his head nodding again as he offered a sympathetic smile that was intertwined with all things apologetic and sweet. It hurt him more than it did you that night, and you could never stay mad at such a kind soul, always forgiving for what Scott does unintendedly.

“Another thing…” He began once more, only this time his voice wavered as if he was testing the waters. It made you wonder just why he was holding such hesitancy. Your friend cleared his throat, “How, ah… how are you feeling after doing all that? Your eyes glowed, you’re getting more into whatever abilities you have. Kind make you wanna find out what else, is uh... what else you can do… right…?”

The fractured sentencing was an indicator, but the way his eyes suddenly couldn’t focus on you and how he was uncertain with his speech – you knew that these words weren’t those of Scott’s.

“Did Stiles put you up to this?” You asked, point blank. Theories were proven correct when Scott’s eyes grew wide and his jaw slammed shut. As if he was caught red-handed with his hand in the cookie jar, a deer in headlights. He wasn’t very subtle. “Scott… I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear to Stiles that I don’t really want to get into that right now.”

“But he worries about you. We both do.” His voice strained, and you tried to not feed into his physical emotion by taking a deep breath and closing your eyes for a mere moment. You weren’t ready to know what you were, or how you could do these things, because what if you didn’t like what the truth held? You can’t go back to an image of normalcy once it is all out in the open.

Your stare held notes of solace, a comfort in knowing that you weren’t alone; and that even though you sometimes felt as if you wanted to give up, the two unlikely friends that wondered so effortlessly into your life wouldn’t dare let you slip, not even in the slightest. You smiled at Scott in perfect timing to the last bell of the day, and he continued to smile back.

“So? Are we going to talk about earlier?” Stiles started immediately as you and Scott met him at the staircase, ushered along with the other students that were preparing to leave school for the day. You both provided a questioning look, and it provoked him to throw his hands up, still appalled by the scene in the cafeteria, “You know, the fact that you’re a terrible bowler!”

Scott turned to see Stiles glaring at him with all of the incredulity he could muster, and it caused a low groan as he remembered the bright white lie he presented so confidently, “I know! I’m such an idiot.”

Stiles continued ranting as he ignored the discomfort etched deeply on Scott’s face, “God, it was like watching a car wreck. I mean… first it turned into the whole group-date thing, and out of nowhere comes… that phrase – “ 

“Hang-out?” You chimed in, finger lazily pointing in his direction, and Stiles reciprocated your gesture and a complementing wide grin.

“Yes! You don’t hang-out with hot girls, okay? It’s like death.”

“Wait –“ You stopped him from proceeding, your body standing still in the middle of the hall as feet planted themselves still. Your brows were furrowed, contemplating the boy’s words, Scott looking between you both in the utmost confusion. You pushed out your lips, ready to press a query, “But we hang out all the time.”

Stiles crossed his arms over his chest as his head fell into an impatient shake, dumbfounded by your statement as he lacked the social cues to understand where this was going, “So?”

“SO… Does that make me not hot?” Your facial features contorted into a grumpy pout as you glared pointedly at Stiles. He immediately stammered, disconcerted with your words as Scott simply just stood to the side in immensely amused shock. It was a well-needed break from his own stresses as he instead observed Stiles making a fool of himself.

Stiles’ pitch increased as he jumped on the defence, hands held high and waving wildly, “What? No! That’s not what I meant!”

“So, you do think I’m hot?”

He was a blubbering mess – caramel eyes large and doe-like when they looked to you in nervousness, words heavy on his tongue as he tried to shake them out. Stiles was digging himself a hole, a deep hole. “Uh… just, let me finish… what I was trying to say is that once it’s hanging-out, you might as well be her gay best friend.” Lengthy fingers wrapped around each other before he shot his hold toward Scott, his attention span providing a clean getaway from the mess he was creating by shifting the conversation from you to his best friend instead, “Hey, maybe you and Danny can start hanging out.”

With squinted eyes you continued to watch Stiles and how he purposely avoided your attention. There was lack of offence on your behalf, it was just funny to watch him squirm. But a small part of you did wonder if you were viewed in this three-way relationship as simply just ‘one of the guys’ – and if you were, is that something you were completely content with.

Scott’s loud groan broke you from your thoughts as his head fell back, eyes closed and hands cupping his face, “How is this happening? I either killed a guy, or I didn’t…”

You were ready to console the young wolf but was cut off by Stiles’ own tangent, his overly-energetic mind already moving way past your previous topic as he began to mumble to himself, his own eyes unfocused as he peered into the distance, “I don’t think Danny likes me.”

“ – I ask Allison on a date, and now we’re… hanging-out…”

“Am I not attractive to gay guys?”

“ – I make first line, and the team captain wants to destroy me…”

“Surely I’m attractive to gay guys.”

You moved yourself so that you were standing before the two boys, your hands held in front of you as you raised a stern voice, “Okay, stop! You’re driving me freaking crazy.” Their heads perked up – like meerkats, cute and sweet and unknowing, bobbing around until they found the source of the noise before settling under your frustrated gaze. You released a softened groan as you rubbed at your temples, firstly looking to Scott with your hands now settling on your hips, “Scott, you need to breathe. Calm down. You’ll get yourself into a panic again.”

You could see as his shoulders slumped, tension slipping away and dropping to the floor. He glanced absentmindedly at his phone before doing a double take, the anxiety back as quick as it left, “Shit, now I’m gonna be late for work.”

A positive from gaining werewolf movement would be his ability to dodge with pure flawlessness. You usually saw it on the Lacrosse field, but now twice in one day as he bolted down the hallway to make it to work on time. You huffed, standing on your toes to see over the crowd as if it would magically help your projection as you called to him, “Don’t forget to breathe!”

“Wait, Scott! You didn’t say…” Stiles called exasperatedly after you, but his friend was already gone. “Am I, am I attractive to gay guys, I just… you didn’t answer my question.” His arms raised on either side of his frame, a deep sigh slipping in annoyance with muttered words. Stiles turned in frustration before seeing you, his face lighting up, “Y’N! Am I attractive to – “

“Nuh uh. You never answered my question from before.” Mischief glinted in your eyes, arms crossed over your chest. Stiles’ jaw slammed shut instantly. “Do you think I’m hot? Or not?”

You had never seen Stiles Stilinski so quiet before. He started at you with a now dropped jaw, unsure of which direction he should take in replying to you. You could feel the restless fluttering, however, in his chest. Or maybe that was just your own butterflies, teetering on the edge as you awaited his answer. Either way, it was affecting you both much more different than you anticipated.

Whether you were joking around or not, you didn’t expect him to take this long to answer – perhaps, he was thinking of a way to let you down easy. Yeah, that must be it. With a loud clearing of your throat, you plastered on a smile, trying to chuckle away the awkward silence.

“I was joking. Come on, weirdo, you’re my ride home.”

[flowers-inmyhair]

Hey peeps, I’ve written things* and decided to summarize them with quotes. All are complete. Read & enjoy (at your own risk 🤗).

- - - - - - - - - -

Hisoka/Illumi (Hunter x Hunter, Illumi POV, First Person, letters to Killua, 35k words, Rated E | creepy, dark, obsessive, funny, sadomasochistic, and kinda existential. A deep-dive into Illumi’s life & my fanfic masterpiece, yo)

More and more, I watched Hisoka disappear from my life and leave holes behind that nothing else could fill. Boredom. Unimaginable boredom. Lying prone on my bed in the Manor, listening to the ticking of my wristwatch, or the metronome, or any of the hundred sitcoms Milluki cycled through again and again every year. The stretches of time grew longer, and I knew that if I asked questions or held on tighter, I would only be chasing Hisoka further away. I hated it. I hated him. I wanted to have him. I wanted to kill him with my bare hands.

-The Three Quintessential Laws for Being An Assassin. Read more here.

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Eloise/Cressida (Bridgerton, Cressida POV, First Person, letter to Pen, 5k words, Rated M | romantic, northern lights, confessions, Austenian)

When she next giggled, I swear, Pen, the sound entered me like music through a wind chime. I mean, really, what on earth has happened to me? Has someone struck me injuriously over the head? I am not the sort of girl to swoon or feel bewitched by the fancies of romance. I am the sort of girl to stuff Mary Wollstonecraft in my knickers and barrel clumsily through a forest.

-The Polarity of Light & Darkness. Read more here.

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Erwin/Levi (Attack on Titan, Levi POV, 3rd Person, 9.8k words, Rated M | bittersweet, poetic, violent, hurt/comfort, fleshing out the Underground and Scout-life. Mind the warnings)

On the shore, their Class A’s are balled up in the mud and the pages of their books dance lightly. Tomorrow, they return by train to HQ. Until then, Erwin swims and Levi watches, occasionally laughing and splashing at him. In all his life, he’s never found the world beautiful. Not before or since.

-Headless Horseman. Read more here.

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Luna/Hermione (Harry Potter, Luna POV, 3rd Person, 4.7k words, Rated T | whimsical, everything is beautiful and nothing hurts, cottage core & afternoon tea vibes)

Always, she’s labeled herself a ‘skeptic’, a ‘woman of rationality’, but Luna’s never met anyone more spiritual or universal than Hermione. There’s a reason the earth is a mother and the moon is a goddess and Hermione is the object of Luna’s affection.

-To Wish On A Rainbow. Read more here.

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Katara/Zuko (Avatar the Last Airbender, Katara POV, 3rd Person, 3.6k words, Rated G | post ATLA grief story memorializing their mothers, a tearjerker with some wholesome silly moments and wisdom from Iroh)

Katara brings her hands to Zuko's, brushing her fingers along his reassuringly. He’s warm. Warmer than any human she’s ever touched before. “Don’t be nervous. It’s just me.”

-In Your Mother’s Honor. Read more here.

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*As a general rule, all my works are pretty faithful to canon.

[jungnoir]

destiny | 06;

⇢ summary: you’re just about ready to give up on life altogether; your love life is in ruins, you’ve lost your job, and your family couldn’t care less about you… and then you meet your blushing guardian angel, and maybe life isn’t so bad after all.

⇢ relationship: jeon jungkook/reader, min yoongi/reader.

⇢ genre: supernatural, angel!au, demon!au, romance, thriller.

⇢ words: 9.8k (rewritten)

⇢ warnings: mentions of physical abuse, graphic depiction of death.

previously |  next

a/n: time for seokjin’s backstory. * is for the beginning of the death scene, so if you’d rather not read it, * will mark the ending of the scene as well. also, this is hella long hahaha hope this makes up for the wait :)

about three hundred and forty years ago.

He’d never seen something so beautiful in his life. You’d think a being who lived amongst the clouds and touched the stars at night would think otherwise but yet here he was, looking upon the face of a baby only a few moments old, her eyes seemingly fixated on air according to her parents, but locked with Seokjin’s a mere breath’s away from the bed she lay on. 

She murmured quietly, little dark curls on her head already beginning to form out of the wisps of hair there, and he had a thought that it might have been as soft as a brush of silk along his hand, the thought making him smile, and in turn, making the baby make a sound her mother cooed at. 

This was the love of his life, his very first and most important. He was to watch her grow and protect her from all that did her harm until the moment she passed, and he would sadly be moved on to another charge shortly after. Until then, he would have to make the most out of this tiny mortal’s life, make sure he could do everything he could to keep her safe. It was his duty as a guardian angel, and it was his duty as her guardian angel.

“Hello, little one,” he coos in a high pitched voice and takes delight when she cocks her head to the side at him, “I’m Seokjin. You won’t remember me in the future but… I’m here to protect you, okay? Try not to make it too hard on me. This is my first job ever and I want to make my boss really proud.”

As if she could understand him, but he smiles anyway and wishes she could, wishes she could continue to see him past this point in time. This moment, so small and barely there in a baby’s eyes was all he had to communicate with the child, so he at least wanted to give her some sort of peace or reassurance that she was cared for, before he was forced to remain in the shadows the rest of her life. Even if a sliver of a memory of him remained in her mind later on, he’d be fine. He’d be happy. She could hold onto that in dark times and that was all he could hope for.

His happiness is cut short however, when he looks across the cramped, dirty room toward the man who had unfortunately helped bring her here. He was a scruffy looking fellow with beady eyes and a frown set into the frame of his mouth, and he looked upon his wife and child with a selfish look. A look that said “Now I have two mouths to feed”. Behind him stood a silver haired angel, eyes naturally baggy and dark, though his aura was much more welcoming than that of his charge. An inkling of a bad feeling began to rise in Seokjin’s throat but he swallowed it down, if only in fear of committing a sin he wouldn’t have even noticed he had later. Even if he disliked her father, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

After all, it was a rule not to tamper with human life beyond the supernatural realm. Something about fate and the like.

“Seokjin,” the angel whips around to meet eyes with one of the other angels in the room, Yeri, who was the guardian of the mother, “she’s very beautiful.”

Seokjin smiles in pride, as if the little girl cradling her mother’s finger was his own child, “Isn’t she? I can’t wait to see what kind of life she has in store.”

Yeri’s smile diminishes some, and her eyes flicker to the same spot in the room Seokjin had been fixated on a moment ago, her own set of unruly feelings fighting to make themselves prominent, “Yes… I only wish good on her life.”

But wishing was not sufficient enough.

“Please be careful, Elinor, you’re going to hurt yourself.”

Seokjin watches the chubby child attempt to make her way along the farm, her small legs giving out every few steps and sending her to the dry grass with a soft thump. He had expected her to cry or wallow in pain every time she did, but like a little soldier, she’d push herself back up again and continue to walk with added excitement in her step. She was determined, he’d give her that.

Seokjin found being a guardian angel felt an awful lot like being a parent, only he was unable to make himself known. He was cursed to watch her make terrible decisions time and time again, and could find no peace even in the night hours when she slept. He knew of infants who would pass in their sleep, and so he’d wait up, agonizingly worrying over whether she’d lose her breath in the night. Yeri had warned him he was being too cautious, that he could be miles away and their bond would alert him of any trouble in an instant, but he swore that the child out of his sight was a danger he didn’t want to risk.

He watches her wobble closer to the road, thankfully void of anyone or anything that might hurt or scare her, and he crouches down in front of her, ignoring the twisting feeling in his stomach when she looks right through his chest, “Elinor,” he sings, “Let’s turn around now, hm?”

But coercing a child was one of the trickiest things a guardian angel could do. They were rather stubborn, you know.

He feels a cool sensation that feels a lot like being shoved in an icy riverbank envelop his body when Elinor walks right through him, and the sadness in his chest nearly makes him gasp. However, he’s quick to turn and continue watching her, making sure she’d at least not cross the road and go into the field of wildly growing grass across from them. He could hear and sense the animals that prowled in it, just waiting for some poor soul to try and come near.

Seokjin was so caught up in making sure she steered clear of the grass that he didn’t hear the human rounding up and right through him, intent on Elinor. The minute he realized who was reaching for her, his chest tightened in fear. 

His big meaty hand seized her small arm so hard it made her fall back onto her behind, yet unlike all the other times she’d fallen, this time tears sprung to her eyes. Seokjin began to panic at the sight, knowing what tears elicited out of the horrid man when he saw them. “Stop your whining, brat!” The man yelled, extending his hand up into the sky, and Seokjin threw himself before Elinor, momentarily forgetting he could literally do nothing to stop the attack, nothing to save Elinor from what was to come, nothing to-

The hand stopped mid-air.

Seokjin tore his eyes away from the crazed man’s to see that another angel had appeared on the scene, inches away from the man’s ear with an expression laced in calm. He was Jisoo, ever the calm one even in situations where Seokjin was not. It appeared he had somehow convinced his charge in his craze to rethink hurting the child, and grudgingly, he retreated, yet continued to drag the little girl into his arms and back toward the farm house, none to gentle even as the little girl cried. 

Seokjin had barely let out a breath before Jisoo was speaking, “You almost exposed yourself to him.”

“He’s a monster. He should be punished for what he does!” Seokjin yells back instantly, his heart hurting in contempt for the man. He hated how logical and calm Jisoo could be, how simply the angel could brush away emotions if only for the greater good. Seokjin was not the type, never could be if this was what he’d have to turn a blind eye to. 

“Are you the Almighty? Do you have the right to judge?” 

“He… he hurts her, Jisoo. That man is out of his mind. He’s terrible… why… why does he get to live a life with them? Why doesn’t he get what he deserves?”

The angel above him looked displeased, but didn’t disagree with him. Seokjin knew deep down that he, too, also felt a level of distaste for his own charge, even if he was conditioned to love him despite it. Yet annoyingly, there was not much he could do about it. Simple whispers in the father’s ear to change his mind had become harder and harder to pull off, and anything past that was out of Jisoo's control.

He opened his mouth, as if he was going to say something else, when he seemed to catch sight of something in the distance. A second passed, and he was suddenly grabbing Seokjin and pushing him toward the farm house, “We must go.”

“W-Why? What’s wrong?” Seokjin tries his best to look over his shoulder, but Jisoo is insistent, pushing the man further down the dirt road where the voices of the fighting parents could be heard clearer and clearer. 

Jisoo's hold slipped, and Seokjin spun on the spot.

She was not hard to miss, with her hair raven and eyes glowing red even from so far away. She stood within the field that Seokjin had been keeping Elinor from entering, long black dress loose and twirling in the wind as she stared forward, unblinking. It didn’t take long for Seokjin to realize she was a demon, and she was rather fixated on him.

“Who is that?” Seokjin finds himself asking, interest piqued. He had never been so close to a demon out here where seldom humans, let alone supernatural creatures, passed by. Seokjin had grown accustomed to the two other guardian angels existing on the property with him, but that was it. The only times he had ever come close to a demon was in town, when the family would rarely go out together. He could never find it in him to make eye contact. 

“A demon… I don’t know why she’s here, but it’s obvious it’s trouble. Go inside, let’s ignore her. Maybe she’ll go.”

She didn’t. If anything, locking eyes with Seokjin made her want to stay all the more.

Seokjin’s favorite time of any day was night. He’d learned that as the moon came, serenity came with it. Life settled and even the evils of the world would come to rest for a while. He enjoyed the view of the sky from the country house because he could see every star he’d ever admired while living in the clouds and it was the only piece of routine he’d maintained since being sent down to earth. He also enjoyed night because Elinor was safe, wrapped in the rays of moonlight as she slept peacefully mere steps away from the window seat where Seokjin rested, back to the window and eyes dancing with love for the baby girl.

It had been days since the incident with the demon in the field, and Jisoo had made it known that she most likely grew bored and left on her own. That was what Seokjin had hoped. That was what Seokjin believed.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you from getting hurt today,” Seokjin whispers, a reciting of the things he felt terrible for that day, “that burn is going to stick with you for a while.” Seokjin looks at Elinor’s arm, where a dark burn takes over the expanse near her wrist. She had never cried quite as hard before, simply wanting to help her mother bake in the kitchen. He hoped that her father would never ask about it.

Seokjin sighs, “And I’m sorry you couldn’t go to town either. I know how much you want to see the fall festival… maybe, if your father stays out of town a little longer, your mother can take-”

The atmosphere of the room changes the minute Seokjin spots something appearing in the corner of his eye.

In seconds, he’s up and in front of Elinor’s bed where she continues to rest, unknowing that before her is her guardian angel… and before him, a demon.

It’s the same one from days ago, her head tilted to inspect the angel as if she’d never seen one before. If Seokjin could make it happen, he’d be throwing actual daggers at her from where he glared, “You have no place here.”

The demon tilts her chin up at him mockingly, “Then I’m very curious how I’m standing here anyway, angel.” She makes no move toward him (or more importantly, Elinor), but instead crosses her arms across her middle, the same dress moving like shadows with her every movement. Her eyes glowed that mysterious undertone of ruby and made him all the more frightened. She stayed somewhat concealed from the moonlight, with just enough illuminating her figure that she looked ghostly.

Seokjin was preparing to question her, when “Do you want me to kill him?” falls from her lips. Seokjin is far too stunned by her question that he falters, and she takes a step forward.

“W-Who?” He asks, pressing closer to the bed, hoping to the Almighty that Elinor would stay safe and sound and asleep through this whole encounter.

The demon’s lip twitches into a smirk, “You know who I am talking about. You’d do it. To protect Elinor, you’d kill her father.” When Seokjin remains silent, for more reasons than one, so she continues, “Regardless, I will.”

“You can’t-” “You can’t, angel. But I can. I can interfere in human affairs as much as I please, it’s the joy of being one of my kind. And if I see a bastard like him raising his hand at anyone in this house again I may just have to… impale him.” Images of Elinor’s father “impaled” leave Seokjin uneasy, but he hates to say that it doesn’t seem all that sad to him either.

He has to repent immediately.

The demon leans against the wall when she’s further in the room, now completely shrouded in moonlight. This was the closest he’d ever been to her, and seeing her now up close was so… odd. He couldn’t lie and say she wasn’t absolutely stunning, in the way a snake might be before it sunk its venom into your neck. Whatever her venom, she didn’t seem at all inclined to use it on him or Elinor right now. If his instincts told him anything, it was that this demon had no enemies in this room tonight.

As the demon watched Seokjin stumble to keep Elinor out of sight, her eyes softened a little and she whispered, “I’m guessing you won’t answer my question.”

Seokjin shakes his head. Smart of him, the demon thinks. “Why would you want to interfere?”

“Us demons have questionable morals sometimes, yes, but even I know someone like him doesn’t deserve to be happy. If your god won’t watch out for them, someone’s got to.” The demon makes sure to glare at the sky, openly cursing the Almighty then and there, and it makes his skin crawl to think what might happen to her because of it. Nothing does, to his relief.

The angel stiffens when Elinor makes a sound, waking, and before he can think the demon is grasping his wrist and pulling him into the darkness. His surprise is evident, “What are you doing? She can’t see me.” He tells the demon as Elinor stirs, eyelashes fluttering the moment he digests how close she is to him. That she's touching him.

The demon looks up at him, and had it not been for the glow of her eyes he might not have bought that she was one. Her warm hand is still wrapped around his wrist, and while he should feel terrified in her presence, all he can think to do is stay still and hope she wouldn’t try to rip his heart out of his chest. She doesn’t answer him as Elinor rubs her eyes and sits up in bed, frowning at the moonlight and blinking away the sleep in her eyes. She stays seated for a little while, unmoving, and then rolls back over in bed to rest again.

“There are moments… fractions of a second where humans can perceive the otherworldly. Straight out of sleep like this, and still so young… yes, she very much could have seen you if you didn’t move.” The demon tells him, fingers slowly detaching from his wrist to rise in front of their faces. The moment Seokjin sees some light emitting from her hand, he grips her limb and moves it toward himself instead.

Shocked, the demon closes her hand and the light dissipates, “…it was a sleeping spell. The pain is…” She gestures over to Elinor, most likely meaning the burn, “…it’s keeping her awake.”

“I don’t trust you. What angel in their right mind would let a demon put a spell on their charge?” Seokjin’s voice turns hard and the demon realizes in that moment that the angel was different than any she’d ever seen before. Guardian angels were always instructed to love their charges but to be objective, to never be emotional in times of stress. But here she was, in the hand of an angel who looked ready to flip hell on its head if she even thought to lay a hand on the child.

She was more intrigued than she was the first time she’d seen him.

“I have no intentions of hurting that little girl. None whatsoever. I swear on my life that if I do hurt her, you can strike me dead here and now. But right now she is hurt and I can help… I will not do anything more if you still disagree.” The demon keeps her voice soft and level, and even moves to take something from the sleeve of her dress. She brandishes a sheathed dagger, and when it touches his free hand, he can feel the magic thrumming through his whole body. “A weapon of my own design. It will kill me if you will your angelic power through it, and you can hold it to my neck while I heal her.”

His instincts once again did not give off any warning signs, though his heart had never beat so fast in his life.

And so, with what he knows could go so horribly wrong, he lets the demon heal Elinor with dagger to neck as instructed. He keeps his eyes more on the demon than Elinor, but there’s no doubt that he can feel his charge’s soul calming as the demon works her magic. He takes a glance, and the burn looks so much better than it did before.

“What is your name?” Seokjin asks after a little while, the demon working diligently to heal his girl.

The demon looks up at him in slight surprise, and then goes back to work with a small smile on her face, “Inhui. And you?”

“Seokjin… Thank you, Inhui.”

“Call it a gift thanks to my questionable morals.”

Seokjin says nothing to Jisoo or Yeri when he sees them, keeping his mouth shut tight and focusing all his attention on Elinor and her newly healed burn. He can tell without hearing it that the other angels are suspicious and astounded at the little girl’s quick recovery, but neither of them approach him the whole next day, or even the day after. It feels odd that he’s left with this feeling of gratitude as he watches Elinor play, not in pain anymore like she had been before. Instead, she’s prancing around her mother who too is stunned at her quick recovery.

It’s only after a week that he is visited by the demon again at the same time in the same place.

Seokjin is sat on the window seat, watching the stars, when a presence makes itself known next to him. The angel jumps in his spot the minute he takes in the dark figure of Inhui, her eyes sparkling with mischief as she keeps a good enough distance away from him. Her arms are crossed and he can see her fingers are glittering with rings that reflect the moonlight well, “Good evening, angel.” Her voice carries softly, and Seokjin casts a quick glance to Elinor in fear that it’ll wake her, but she is deeply asleep as snores pass her lips.

Seokjin couldn’t fathom a reason why the demon was visiting once again, or why she looked so comfortable in his presence and they had only ever talked to each other once. However, the demon moves with grace until she’s leaning against the opposite end of the window seat, now the moonlight only casting him in a glow and making him feel vulnerable under her sharp gaze in the dark.

Swallowing, he answers, “Hello,” he winces at the crack in his voice, much to the demon’s amusement, “…w-what are you doing here?”

Inhui casts a glance toward the little girl and sighs, “…it’s oddly calm here, lately. Where is the father?”

Seokjin hums, “He’s away on business… or something to that effect. I personally think he’s fallen into a ditch somewhere drunk.” Seokjin feels a little pride when Inhui laughs, and then blinks when she scoots his feet away and takes the seat furthest from him (out of respect for his personal space). She curls her own legs underneath her and looks rather comfortable sitting there, like she could belong here.

She too casts her gaze out of the window, “It’d be better for everyone if that were true… why are you always looking at the stars, I wonder?”

Seokjin licks his lips nervously, pulling his knees to his chest and resting his chin on his folded arms, keeping a watchful eye on the demon who leaves him cautious. “I… sometimes miss home.” He says honestly, fiddling with the fabric of his shirt.

She looks over at him and he swears there’s something like empathy in those dark red eyes, but it doesn’t feel totally unsettling like usual, “I see. I assume you don’t get to visit.”

“I wish, but I wouldn’t go unless Elinor could come with me. I’m sure she’d love heaven. I could see her dancing on the clouds and riding on my back as we fly through the sky… I’d show her the sunset from up there, it’s gorgeous.” Seokjin turns his gaze from the stars to the sleeping girl feet away from the two otherworldly beings at her window seat, her chest rising and falling with a steady rhythm that instantly puts him at ease. Inhui follows that gaze with wonder.

Carefully, the demon speaks, “I bet she would love to go with you. One day, she will.” Seokjin’s heart breaks at what the demon implies, and he quickly hardens his expression to hide the panic that flashes across his visage for a split second, as if Inhui hadn’t already seen it. “Sorry, I should be more careful of my words,” She apologizes, “I promise I meant it in a comforting way. Better there then-” “I understand what you meant, I just- I hope that day stays away for a very long time.”

The demon and angel continue the night in silence, staring outside the window and longing for homes and worlds they hadn’t seen in a while… all the while stealing glances of each other and pretending to have not when the other would catch them.

His name was John Hatchett. He was thirty-eight years old, had eyes dark and empty like the deepest pits of hell, and yet managed to be so painfully human that Seokjin had no right to lay a hand on him as long as he was alive. Inhui, on the other hand, had every right in the world.

It was his fifth night in a row that he’d stayed out all night and drank until the sun came up and pimples scattered his ugly skin like his body was desperately trying to flush out his filth for him. It had been the fifth night that he had lived carelessly, wasting the little money he did make on alcohol or women or whatever he could to occupy his time. It had also been the first time since she’d come into the picture weeks ago that he had raised his hand on his wife, hours prior to fucking off to the nearest bar in search of an escape.

Inhui had watched it all, so angry she had caused him to trip on a “misplaced” rake outside and hoped the fall would split his skull right down the middle. It hadn’t, just caused him to stumble a little on his way to town. At first, she had wondered if she should have just finished him there, but no… she had felt the eyes burning into her back the second she had thought it. Sure enough, casting her eyes up to the window looking out over the field, she’d seen Seokjin giving her a look to please think this through.

So she was good. She waited. She had tailed the bastard and all his vicious mumbling well into town and into the closest bar, and a few hours later, the guy was too drunk off his ass to know right from left. She had intended to shove him into a waste bucket and leave him there for someone else to find the miserable mutt, but it felt so wrong just leaving it as it was.

She had been visiting Seokjin for a few weeks now, under the guise of boredom or pure curiosity or whatever lie she could think up. It was always the same time and place, and Seokjin had become a lot more comfortable around her than he had in the beginning. She thought it had a lot to do with what’d she done for Elinor, and so she didn’t stop. Whenever she would notice a new scratch or if Elinor was running a fever, she’d be right by the child’s side, healing her so she could sleep peacefully. Elinor’s mother had chalked it up to her having an amazing guardian angel, to which Seokjin had blushed at. He had mumbled something like “I’m not nearly as capable” and she had spent the rest of her time with him, reassuring him he was and so much more.

It was odd… she had a place to be. A place to visit. A place where, when it was quietest, she could escape into the presence of a being purer than herself. Someone who radiated innocence, justice, love… things she had despised for much of her demon life. All those things were things only humans could have. All those things were things only beings deserving of them could have.

And yet, when she was with Seokjin, watching over Elinor… she felt she was pretty damn close to having it. 

Demons weren’t supposed to feel like she was when she was with Seokjin, and maybe God was gearing up to smite her (she’d like to see him try, the wish-washy bastard) soon for tainting him, but if that was the case, she’d do as she pleased if only for whatever time she had left to do it. That was the way of her kind: live like you’ve got eternity to make up for it, because you do. She doubted she would regret what she was planning to do now, and if Seokjin hated her for it, he’d have his own eternity to get over it.

She watched as John stood, following a young woman while wetting his lips. A chill ran down Inhui’s spine and she promptly stood, her being masked as she slunk after him. She could feel all his feelings toward the woman, and each and every one of them made her sick to her stomach.

He even had the audacity to call out to her, startling the poor thing and making her stumble in her walk. It seemed she hadn’t even realized he was there in the first place, and she started to wonder what would happen if she wasn't there.

It only took a few more moments of walking before Inhui had figured she’d had enough and promptly materialized behind him, snagging him by the collar and yanking him back until he was hanging off the ground by his shirt. The woman he’d been following stared at Inhui, paralyzed with confusion and fear, not totally sure who she should be more scared of at this point.

Inhui, smiling as softly as she could, whispers “go” under her breath and watches as the girl scrambles around a corner and away. As soon as she’s sure the girl is out of sight, Inhui releases John and the man falls to his knees in a crumpled heap, gasping for breath after being strangled by his own shirt for so long in the air.

“…you… bitch-” He rasps, barely getting a chance to finish his insult before Inhui is flicking her hand to the immediate left, and the vile man goes flying into the alleyway just to the side of them, his body colliding with the cold, stone wall of an old bakery with a sickening thwump! that makes even her skin tingle (with excitement). He falls to the ground like a ragdoll, hunched in on himself and barely having the strength to raise his head to her in his intoxicated state. However, when he finally does make eye contact, all Inhui can see is unbridled fear and it excites her even more.

Flicking her hand again, the man is raised onto his feet and then shoved back into the wall by invisible bonds, his hands and legs utterly useless to him now. There is nowhere else to look but at her, and when Inhui’s eyes flash that dangerous red, she sees his pants leg get warm. Wet.

“I am the bitch who has your pathetic life in her hands. Are you scared? I can smell it.” She laughs, barely casting a glance down to his soiled clothes to know that he’s released on himself in the midst of his astonishment. The smell is putrid, just like his soul. In the middle of her laughter, she notices that he's mumbling something, words... a prayer. “Are you... praying to God?”

The man even dares to whimper an affirmative.

“He may be more corrupt than I am,” she giggles, as if this is just a peaceful walk in the park, “but trust me… he’s not listening. This is between you and me now, baby.”

It’s the first time in what feels like a long time where Inhui has felt her true self emerge from the surface, the part of her she had opted to keep on a leash because of him and her. She hadn’t wanted to scare them, hadn’t wanted to ruin something she finally felt good doing for once in her life. But now… all of her pent up rage was being poured into something and she could let loose because for once, her conscience, which at one point she had deemed practically nonexistent, was no longer bothering her.

No, she was doing this for them.

*

“Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to have your heart being ripped out of you? I’m sure you haven’t. I’m sure you haven’t even got a heart to rip out… but I’m not one to jump to conclusions. I guess the only way I can satisfy my curiosity is to check, hm?” She hisses, hovering a hand over his chest where her nails extend into needlepoint claws. John prays with all his might now, knowing very well that the woman before him was something inhuman. If he must repent for what he’d done, surely this was the time to do it? Surely, he would be okay if he just-

He doesn’t feel it at first, her nails sinking into his chest. It’s so blindingly painful that his mind blanks the minute it happens, but then his senses all come back at once like he’d been dumped under ice cold water and yanked right back out to feel the stabbing sensation it left behind, not even granted the chance to feel numb.

Inhui’s hand visibly shakes with rage as it curls in, crushing his flesh under the pressure of her strength. Blood gushes around her fingertips and out of her victim’s mouth as she presses her free hand into his gut, hard. She’s surely broken several ribs at this point, the bones digging into his lungs as they fill with blood.

The hand over his chest clutches tighter, and then she feels what she was looking for, giving him one last sickly smile if only to rub it in more, “So you do have one. Perfect.”

And no longer is it attached to him.

She lets him fall to the ground for a final time, holding his heart in her hands and barely flinching at the strong stench it gives off in her hold. She can feel it thump, thump, thump until it’s no more.

Staring at it as her wits come back to her, she examines the organ in her grasp and then drops it, crushing it with the heel of her shoe with a snarl, “It’s as black as I thought.”

*

At the very edge of the alleyway, far enough from the demon's sight, Jisoo flinches at the squelch. A searing burn begins to travel up his spine.

Seokjin doesn’t see her for quite some time after that, but when he is visited by a much different Jisoo without his charge in tow, his suspicions are unfortunately confirmed. Seokjin can’t even mask his shock when the angel approaches, eyes burning into the younger with something that says more than he could put into words.

“I know we’re supposed to love them,” Jisoo starts, and his voice cracks some, “but… he was a monster… so this is my fate, Jinnie.”

Seokjin couldn’t understand even after Jisoo had hugged him tearfully, and then did the same to Yeri who was much more levelheaded than he. Jisoo had fought, though, hadn't he? He must have put up a fight. No doubt, he'd probably taken Inhui's life in retaliation for killing John... it was what the Jisoo he knew would do. Why did he feel like he didn't know Jisoo that well at all, now?

He didn't. Jisoo had promised he would visit when he could, but that he needed to figure out what to do now that he was no longer an angel. His only choices were very clear; it was only a matter of time before Seokjin found out which one it was.

It was strange to find the time after Jisoo's departure as calming despite the mix of feelings that it all brought him. Jisoo hadn't mentioned the fate of Inhui, nor anything more than sweet goodbyes and warm promises. Even as he missed the angel, he did not miss his charge. It was only a little while after the entire mess that the mother had been visited and told of her husband's murder. It was... odd, the relief that washed over the home when they'd told them the charge was found brutally mutilated in town. While Elinor found it confusing, her mother explained it as best as she could in her own shock. One thing was clear: every one in that house had not mourned a day since the news broke.

However, it didn’t take long for Seokjin to feel like he was missing something.

Despite spending most of his time caring for Elinor, a majority of his worries left him with the source of all her problems gone now. The money John had kept away from the family was finally given to them, and whatever they needed to get by on was also given to them, so finances were thankfully taken care of.

Instead of a weeping widow, Elinor’s mother was as sprightly as she could be, dashing around the house here and there and taking care of Elinor the best she could. Yeri had sworn she’d only seen her this happy before she married that man.

As Elinor grew with the years, Seokjin became more and more proud of the woman she was becoming. He watched her transition to flowy skirts and strange new updos that he’d seen some of the townswomen wearing on the now frequent occasions the women of the house left to shop together. He’d never been out of the house so often the entire time he’d been with Elinor, and he had never known there was so much to offer in their little town until then.

And with every visit, he searched for Inhui.

Her disappearance had left him extremely worried, wondering if maybe something had happened to her in the midst of killing John that Jisoo hadn’t told them. After all, the angel hadn’t stayed much longer after what had happened for Seokjin to even ask.

He had no way to contact her, and going out of his way to fraternize with demons surely wouldn’t earn him points with the Almighty. After a few more years, he had to stop himself from trying to find her face in every crowd; If not for his sake, then Elinor’s.

By the time Seokjin had become accustomed to Inhui’s disappearance from his life, Elinor had just turned seventeen years old. Seventeen and embarrassingly in love with a baker’s son.

Seokjin follows the bright-eyed teenager with a playful scowl on his face, watching the way she fiddles with her new dress and her new hairdo and her mother’s basket to go collect the groceries for the day. Ever since she’d reached that age, she was impossibly hard to keep up with. He had started to feel an awful lot like an old man, watching her tie daisy chains in the fields while muttering the name of some boy she'd grown inexplicably in love with for the day. He wasn’t dumb, and he knew one day she would meet someone and possibly fall in love, and all he could hope for was that whoever it was she fell for was the right one.

But he still really, really didn’t like tagging along on their dates.

Seokjin watches as they approach the familiar bakery from the back, the angel muttering something about how scandalous his girl had gotten before she’s slipping through the kitchen door and finding her target of affection kneading bread. Seokjin watches as she approaches him from behind and the boy, too kind and too gentle that Seokjin had wondered if it was all a show, turns and greets Elinor with a happy kiss.

“No need to vomit, Seokjin. They’re a sight for sore eyes.” A peachy voice scolds from across the room, and when Seokjin meets eyes with Minhyuk, the older angel makes a point to gag loudly in retaliation.

Minhyuk was the guardian angel to Christopher, Elinor’s “lover”, and was probably more pure than even the holiest angels Seokjin had ever come across. However, the angel did have his mischievous side, which often landed him in more trouble than he was probably willing to admit. Still, he was on the good side of the Almighty so Seokjin didn’t worry too much for him anymore.

The younger angel waltzed on over to Seokjin, beaming as he asked how things had been. It had been a while since they’d last seen each other, what with Christopher having gone to be the apprentice to another baker a few towns over for a couple of months. No matter how “disgusted” Seokjin pretended to be, he was very glad the seemingly perpetual frown on Elinor’s face had vanished the minute she realized that Christopher was home and she could go see him.

“Things have been quiet at the house, but I’m really glad Elinor has perked up again. I thought she was going to have a pout frozen on her face if Christopher stayed away any longer.” Seokjin divulged, watching the younger angel snicker.

“I was worried about Christopher too. Their letters to each other weren’t nearly enough.” As if to prove his point, Minhyuk waves his hand toward the two lovers embracing each other and Seokjin smiles, however tinged with sadness it might have been. She was growing so fast before his eyes, yet he could still remember when she was a baby… like it was yesterday.

The two angels continue to talk, following their charges on their night out on the town. They share stories of the places they’d been and the things they’d seen, almost in their own little world. Seokjin didn’t get to socialize with other angels too often, so when he did, he jumped at the opportunity. It had only been an hour into the night when Minhyuk had finally piped down, looking a little concerned, “Seokjin… I think there’s a demon here.”

Every hair on Seokjin’s body stands erect at once, his heart stuttering in his chest. He can’t believe Minhyuk had picked up on the presence before he had; maybe he had been too carefree, or maybe he’d been so used to that presence before that it wasn’t so easily disruptive…

For whatever reason, it didn’t matter. She was here.

The eldest whips his head around the small restaurant that their charges have slipped into, talking animatedly to each other about this and that and more. He almost misses her, almost. She is the dark energy sitting in the corner of the room with eyes trained on him and only him, expression turned into one of sorrow that he’d never seen before on her. It didn’t suit her.

He can’t tell you how long he stared before he decided to approach her, instructing the other angel to keep close watch over their charges while he inspected Inhui. The demon had changed since the day she left, exchanging her long, billowy dress for something shorter and closer fitting. Her long hair no longer draped her face, but was instead braided behind her back to showcase her strong gaze more prominently. She no longer looked so much like the shadows that lurked in Elinor’s bad dreams, but more like the woman you wouldn’t dare cross on the street. Only slightly less intimidating, he thought. Her beauty had never left her, though.

As he got closer, he realized she was acting rather uncharacteristically: her fingers fumbled with each other in her lap and her gaze shifted from his eyes to his chest as he got closer. He’d have mistaken her for a kicked puppy if he didn’t know any better, “What are you doing here?”

His voice is not void of cracks in it, the sheer surprise reaching Inhui in an instant and making her sigh. She finally looks him in the eyes again and holds out one of her hands, some of her favorite rings having been removed, “Can we talk?”

He lets her lead him by his hand outside, giving Minhyuk a comforting look before they entered the cool air of the night. It was less loud out here, despite being only a door away from the excitement. “I… I was debating on coming back at all, if I’m being honest. I wasn’t sure how you’d react if I did.” “Were you expecting me to be angry?” He asks, watching as she remains dubious with a noncommittal hum. “I’m not, by the way,” he adds, though he can understand why she’d mistake the emotion in his voice for anger, “I’m just confused… and I want to know what happened that made you run away.”

She furrows her brows, “Didn’t the angel tell you?”

Seokjin recalls Jisoo's last moments with them and frowns, “I was shocked, but I don’t think even if I wasn’t that I would have fully understood. Yeri did, but she was with him longer.”

Inhui takes a breath, leaning her back against the wall of the restaurant and looking away from him and toward the street, “That night, the last time I saw you, I followed John to the bar and killed him on his way out,” she decided to leave the gruesome details out; she expected he knew enough about it anyway, “I was so consumed with rage that I hadn’t even thought about the fact that the bastard had an angel protecting him… but the angel didn’t show until well after the last breath left John. I was surprised, shocked… I couldn’t understand why his angel let me do all of that and didn’t even try to stop me. I thought that all angels had such a bond with their charges that even if they didn’t think they were a good person, they’d at least try to protect them, right? But that angel… he just watched.”

Seokjin felt that same odd feeling again, picturing Jisoo, his mentor and friend, watching his charge die in such a terrible way and not even flinching. The older angel had been beside him since the moment he’d come to earth, had been just as caring toward him as Yeri, and had always made sure he kept on the right and just path. He had felt like a big brother to him, and now he was hearing that that same big brother figure had done nothing in the face of a demon killing the one person he was sworn to protect. He had a feeling in his stomach that only escalated the longer Inhui talked.

“When I had finally calmed down, I was expecting him to smite me. To stab me through the heart or throat or head or whatever was more painful. Hell, I was half-ready to hand him my dagger to do it because I felt so… powerful,” Seokjin looks at Inhui’s hands, curled in like the claws of a lion, “I had never felt so angry in my life and it scared me. But that angel, Jisoo, he just watched. And when it was all calm, I asked him if it hurt. And he said "yes, but it hurt less knowing that even if I wasn’t the one to kill him in the end, he was gone for good". I asked him if he wanted to save himself, but he told me he’d think about it. It’s been years and he’s living somewhere peaceful, still thinking about it.”

Inhui looks up at the stars next, ironically appearing like she was praying to the Almighty for strength, “I didn’t know if I could face you after that, so I just never came back. After all, the one thing that kept me there was making sure that little girl was safe, and with that bastard gone, my work was done.”

“Why… why did you care so much? Our troubles had nothing to do with you, and yet you still intervened. Why?” Seokjin had asked those same questions to himself so many times, yet now they were finally reaching their intended target.

The demon looked away from the sky and into his eyes, effectively trapping him there with her gaze, “You two made me feel human.”

Yeri had grown quite used to the demon coming to visit again, so much so that the angel would often ask Seokjin about her if she wasn’t around for whatever reason. Despite Yeri’s initial warnings about overstepping the rules of the angels, she had been as civil and kind as she usually was toward Inhui. The demon, as far as Seokjin knew, had refrained from any truly sinful activities since the day she’d come back into town, and he had started to see her as something like Elinor’s second guardian.

A few years had passed and before Seokjin knew it, it was the summer of Elinor’s twentieth year on earth and she was getting married. Minhyuk had been so elated by the news that he’d promptly thrown himself over Seokjin and declared himself the angel’s official little brother, right before Seokjin had explained that technically, all angels were related in the first place. His technicalities were ignored, regardless.

Seokjin had been there for the months prior when Elinor’s mother had eventually passed, peaceful and happy to see her child living a life far away from the man who had hurt them both. Now, she was with someone who loved and cared for her and who she knew she could trust her with, and that was all that mattered to her in the end. Watching Elinor grow into such a strong woman had made him so proud that he’d probably cried more times about it than he would have liked to say (Inhui knew how many times, and she teased him about it regularly).

Standing in the field in front of their home, Seokjin stood with his proud eyes watching Elinor dance with her new husband. The jolly band playing on the other side of the grass enchanted everyone at the wedding to come close and dance together, losing their inhibitions with the wine sparkling on their tongues and the happiness of the occasion. Minhyuk had joined in dancing with a few of the angels that had attended with their charges, having spent most of his night glued to another angel, Jooheon. Seokjin swore if Jooheon wasn’t there, he’d be the one roped into dancing with him instead.

It’s only when the music turns into a slow ballad that he feels a presence behind him, and when he glances back to see just who it is, he’s startled by Inhui’s closeness to him. The demon grins wickedly, holding out her hand in front of him in traditionally the way he should have been doing to her, “Care to dance?”

“I think that would be breaking about twenty different angelic rules, actually.” Seokjin smirks, giving her a little nudge with his shoulder that only has her rounding in front of him and holding out her hand to him with more determination.

Inhui’s incessant need to braid her hair had given her midnight strands a naturally wavy effect once let free, making them curl around her face in a pretty pattern. She had still stayed true to her dark clothes, no one able to see her in the first place, but she had opted for a somewhat occasion-worthy dress if only so Seokjin wouldn’t poke fun at her. It was nothing like the one she used to wear, which in Seokjin’s mind, was a positive thing. “Me simply looking at you should be breaking about twenty different angelic rules, yet here we are. Rebels.”

At this point, Seokjin is finding it a little hard to say no again.

She’s just about to pull away before Seokjin drops his hand in hers and lets her pull him onto the makeshift “dance floor”, her grin melting into something softer. He tries not to let his mind race, but this is probably the most intimate he’s ever been with another person, and he feels like this should be wrong in a more evident way. It isn’t.

He actually has fun as she begins to slow dance with him, her hand on his hip as she takes the lead. His skin is probably on fire and she’s probably internally teasing him about it, but thankfully she keeps whatever remarks she has to herself for the time being. He’s never really been one to dance, but he’d grown used to the hobby as the happiness in the household finally flourished at the death of John. Some mornings, he’d wake to Elinor singing a tune she’d heard in town and dancing this way and that as she got ready for her mornings.

He assumed Inhui would know much more about dancing, having been exposed to it more in her adventurous life. “Don’t be shy, dancing isn’t so much about doing it perfectly as it is about having fun.” She reassures him as she catches him watching his feet, looking a little upset when he trips over his own feet a few times.

He huffs, looking up at her, “Says you. You’re dancing perfectly.”

Inhui smiles endearingly at the pout on his face and pulls him a little closer, catching him off guard. He’s forced to look her in the eyes when the space between their bodies disappears. “Stop pouting, it doesn’t do that pretty face justice.” This effectively makes him soften his expression and blush.

Seokjin turns his eyes to the side instead, looking over at Elinor and Christopher. He can hardly believe she’s so big now, in love with someone and planning to start a family with them. He’s so happy she’s happy.

Inhui watches him watch her, and she hums, “You’ve done a great job, Seokjin. She’s grown into such a beautiful woman.”

Seokjin looks back at Inhui with a grateful smile, “Hasn’t she? I almost feel like her father, watching her like this… This is all I’ve ever wanted for her.” He absentmindedly squeezes Inhui’s hand in his, forgetting all about how “badly” he was dancing as he falls into a comfortable routine with the demon. “Thank you, by the way.”

Inhui’s eyebrows raise at this. “For what you did,” Seokjin continues, tone more serious, “…I don’t think she’d be here right now if it wasn’t for what you did…”

Inhui feels her heart flutter a little, and her hand on his waist squeezes there, “I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat if I had to. That little girl deserved more than what she was destined for.”

The angel nods minutely, shutting his eyes for a moment as the music lulled him into a sense of calm. This, without a doubt, had to be the most content moment of his angelic life. He silently prayed that it would only continue like this. “Don’t feel bad,” Inhui murmurs, catching his attention again as his eyelashes flutter, “I know you would do whatever you could to protect whoever you could. So don’t feel like you failed her in any way, okay?”

He stares at the demon, the demon who he remembers striking fear and curiosity into his heart the first time he’d seen her. Despite being his polar opposite, she fit him so well. She held him lovingly, in a way he was told demons were incapable of, and if anyone were to rival his love for Elinor, it would be her. If it was wrong to feel this way about her, was it bad he didn’t mind?

“…I won’t. Because from now on, I will be the hero. I will protect the people I love first and foremost, even at the cost of myself.” He declares it confidently, holding Inhui a little tighter. The demon says nothing, letting Seokjin just hold her as they continued to sway to the music. Was it just the candle lights, or were her eyes sparkling?

Inhui swallows, “I believe that much, Seokjin.”

Inhui doesn’t leave Seokjin’s side the entire night, even after all the guests go home and the wedding reception draws to a close. He recalls that Jisoo had sent a gift to the happy couple, though it was marked under the name of a distant family member as to not confuse them. He also recalls that on the walk back to the old house that he had known since Elinor’s birth, through all the trials and tribulations they’d faced under that roof, he was watching a new chapter of Elinor’s life begin. The emotions were almost choking him as Inhui led him in, Minhyuk opting to stay outside to enjoy the night sky for everyone knew what was to come.

Immediately, Inhui drew Seokjin into the farthest part of the house away from the newlyweds upstairs, which just so happened to be the study Elinor had turned into her own private library. There were already a few candles lit inside, the warm summer air carrying in through the window and playing with the flames.

Seokjin let Inhui settle him down on the couch in front of the great window looking out at the starry sky. He feels her settle down close to him, her hands wrapped around his arm and her head leaning against his chest. They’d never been this touchy with each other before, and Seokjin couldn’t say it wasn’t affecting him. “I suddenly realize that the rest of our life with Elinor will be escaping to the farthest room when they’re… doing that.”

Inhui snickers, squeezing his bicep, “Having sex, you mean?” “Shh, I don’t want to think of my little Elinor- ugh, no, no, no-” “Do you need a distraction?” Inhui inquires, watching mirthfully as the angel laughs and nods his head at her, mid-hair-pull. He doesn’t realize until he’s turned his head that they’re both much closer than he had originally thought and… oh, she was quite stunning.

Carefully, she reaches her hand up to his cheek and pulls him even closer and he complies like putty in her hands, “Can I… kiss you, Seokjin? Would that be alright?”

Seokjin doesn’t know who she’s asking if it’ll be alright to, because if it’s him, then of course it is. And if it’s the Almighty, then surely she knows that answer fairly well. But right now? He doesn’t want to think about anyone else but her, so all he says is a breathy “yes” before she’s taking him in and kissing him.

Their soft, careful kisses escalate as he gets the hang of things. She goes slow, asking him if he’s alright and if he wants to stop, but he keeps telling her that everything is perfect and they fall into the very thing they were trying desperately not to think about.

It’s only when it’s all said and done, when she’s laying bare on top of him and he the same underneath her, that it settles in what has just occurred. The starry sky looks blacker than usual, and the candlelight seems dimmer. The once warm summer air turns cold and makes goosebumps rise on his skin.

Before Seokjin can succumb to the gentle lull of sleep, a deep, imposing voice shatters his peace and reverberates through his body so strongly that he fears it’ll wake the slumbering Inhui in his arms. The voice is one he hadn’t heard in a while, and the sheer power of it sends him shuddering when he realizes that everything that he’s just done was seen. All of it. Every second, and he was to pay the price.

“Seokjin,” the voice calls, fury in every syllable of his name, “guardian angel and my creation, you have committed a sin worse than any… and you shall find your punishment far worse than burning at the hands of every demon in hell."

[youjusttryandstopme]

This is the longest Tumblr post I have ever read but it was worth it

A Narrative Designer Dissects Generation Loss

(And Further Thoughts on Dollhouse-like Streams)

I keep saying how Jerma's ushered in an entirely new narrative medium and no-one's believed me.

This has been stewing in my mind for months. Ever since watching The Dollhouse Stream while going through a bout of just-got-my-second-covid-shot fever, one thought has carved itself on the inside of my skull. It is something I truly believe, and am baffled that more people aren't talking about.

Livestreams are evolving into an interactive narrative artform.

Generation Loss has only cemented this for me.

This is something I will keep yelling from the rooftops until my throat is sore, and this essay is my desperate attempt to get other people to start paying attention to interactive livestreams.

Livestreams as a Medium

By definition, a livestream is anything broadcast over the internet to a live audience. Over time this has generally fallen into a standard format thanks to the community of livestreaming centred around Twitch, of a livestreamer playing a video game with a live chat engaging in the experience in some capacity. This is to the point that someone who describes themselves as a "streamer" will come with the assumption that they play games for a live audience.

However, this is a flexible format, and doing out-of-the-box livestreams is nothing new. Stream team Radio TV Solutions are infamous for putting on weird, absurdist, and even genre-bending takes on playing games for audience entertainment. Some of their streams can be likened more to a live broadcast show, rather than a simple "gaming stream".

But, what we're focusing on here are interactive livestreams, and not just streamers taking an interesting spin on the format. Such examples are the likes of Charborg, presenting his chat with a question, with individual members voting on a response, to then be dragged at random into a literal court of opinion to debate the reason for their choice. He puts his audience directly in control of the stream and its direction, with both streamer and chatter having to "roleplay" into the experience.

Interactive livestreams even extend beyond Twitch's roots of gaming content. Alistair Aitcheson is known for his interactive art streams, where he creates paintings with direct input from the audience watching. Here, the audience decides what Alistair should do and how he should do it, whether that be drawing a black cat, only being allowed to paint with his elbows, or using mayonnaise as a pigment.

But, by far, the most famous player in this space is streamer and former TF2 creator (of which, as someone who's been a fan of his since 2012, am shocked that more people don't know) Jerma985. Over time, Jerma has become known for his "big streams", where he will do anything from broadcasting a fake family dinner where everyone but Jerma is an actor that have never met each other, to digging up rocks in the Nevada desert in collaboration with a local science institution, to organising an entire baseball game of half actors and half actual athletes, complete with a full live commentary.

In 2019, Jerma broadcast "The Carnival Stream", a defining work for interactive livestreams. Jerma played the role of a ringmaster, bringing his chat around various carnival games that could be played with Twitch chat-powered robots. Almost immediately it became a sensation, and put Jerma down as one of the most innovative livestreamers to date. It was something Twitch had never seen before. Truly, no-one was doing it like Jerma.

At this point, livestreams are a medium that are going through radical innovations. People are doing interesting things with the concept, experimenting with what you can and can't do, and pushing them into new and fascinating directions of entertainment.

How do you turn entertainment into an artform?

The Impact of the Dollhouse Stream

During my undergraduate, my professor told me one thing I've held dear to my ethos ever since. Discussing the ways narratives are woven into video games, he said:

"The difference between a toy and art, is that art is able to tell a story."

It's a measurement that's never failed me. Everytime I've looked at something, and wondered if I could call it art, I remember this. Art is made through narrative. And one thing I'm always fascinated by, is if a medium can tell a narrative uniquely compared to others. I develop games fulltime, and both my studio and solo projects are focused on how to most effectively tell a story through whatever means it finds itself in. Interactive narrative experiences are something I hold very dear.

When Jerma announced "The Dollhouse Stream" to broadcast in 2021, the hype was electric. By now Jerma's big streams had become an internet sensation, even to the point of being affectionately dubbed "The Superbowl for the gays". With the only information on the stream being something influenced by The Sims, taking place over three individual broadcasts, tens and thousands of viewers tuned in to watch.

What we saw was, I truly believe, the beginning of livestreaming turning into an artform.

The Dollhouse Stream took interactive livestreams in ways that have never been seen before, and it's an absolute marvel that it exists at all. It was brilliant, hilarious, and absolutely groundbreaking.

And, there was a plot.

It was a loose plot, and just served as a way to funnel more shenanigans on screen, but it existed and fulfilled the exact purpose it was set out to do. There were defined beats, a set way it was going to end, and the interactive elements were giving a unique experience on how we'd get there.

This is where I felt my fixation latch. This could be a new narrative medium.

I prayed, and hoped, this was just the beginning of streams like this.

An Analysis of Generation Loss as an Interactive Narrative

(And Other Parts that Caught my Attention)

Disclaimer: Any critiques in this section are given entirely in good faith, and have no bearing on the immense amounts of work by those who worked on Generation Loss. This comes from me believing with my whole heart that interactive livestreams could, and should, be judged as an artform, and thus subject to the same level of critical analysis.

My prayers for more were answered when Generation Loss was announced as a "live interactive horror show". I decided to go into the stream blind, for better or worse, only knowing that the stream was based around horror, and almost certainly would be set in its own self-contained narrative. There was supplementary media around it to hype the stream up and flesh out the story around it, but I wanted to see how well this could stand on its own, and if interactive livestreams really could be the new narrative medium I was hoping they were.

Episode One

was absolutely not what I was expecting.

The tonal whiplash I felt on realising this was being played as a comedy is not something I'm quite able to describe. 

This doesn't make it bad; far from it. In retrospect it's a perfect intro to the slow descent from light-hearted comedy romp that's almost self-aware into a serious psychological horror.

Being familiar with The Dollhouse Stream, the structure is almost identical, with an audience presented with a choice, going to a timed vote, and having the choice with the highest percentage play out in whatever ways it might. Between beats of the audience picking a choice and seeing its consequences, the downtime is filled with the streamers reacting to the choices, shooting the shit, or guiding the stream through scripted plot beats.

But Generation Loss takes it in a slightly different direction. The Dollhouse Stream is based on life simulation games, with the audience trying to keep Jerma alive (or, most of the time, deliberately starving or exhausting him to see what would happen), earning money to buy furniture, upgrading the house, and sitting back to watch the chaos they've inspired. 

Generation Loss, however, commits to the theme of an adventure game.  Ranboo wakes up in a cabin, realises they're stuck in there, and we're presented with the first choice of picking somewhere to investigate, and later learning that we have an inventory. There's no objective, beyond a vague semblance of knowing we need to get out, and having to explore to find out what we're supposed to do. As the audience we have direct control over his actions, and decide where Ranboo should search next, guide him through various puzzles, and help him out of precarious situations.

Once I settled into what I was watching, the stream was great. It kept up the pace, everyone was hilarious, played into its cheese, and was a solid take on an interactive livestream. 

But, the one thing I was hoping for wasn't there, with interactivity that was played with in interesting manners. It was fairly obvious that every choice would lead us to the same, if not a similar outcome. With The Dollhouse Stream, Jerma choosing to flirt with someone rather than simply talking to them could have huge impacts on where the day-to-day plot would go, and how everyone else responded to it in turn.

After some thought, I settled on this being episode one. Something new could be coming in the future, and there was no way the advertising banked this hard into horror to just be a simple comedy setup. This episode was a great start, made good use of interactive livestreams as a medium, and made me cautiously optimistic for the rest of the series.

Episode Two

Starting episode two, it took me all of three seconds to recognise the Saw inspiration and know exactly who would be behind it.

For those who haven't been following Jerma for long enough to cause permanent damage to your psyche, Jerma has an ongoing joke of putting on an audio filter and speaking like Jigsaw, running through bizarre or entirely mundane takes on Saw traps. This all stemmed from one House Flipper stream, which quickly spirals into an insistence that the Saw movies have an obsession with neurotoxins and nerve agents, which chat is very quick to disprove, and the legend of GYAS is born.

So as a Jerma fan, witnessing the culmination of a years-long bit, this was fucking hilarious.

But as someone looking to this series as a new narrative direction for interactive livestreams, I started to get a little concerned. It seemed to be hitting much the same points as The Dollhouse Stream, without really pushing into new fields on the narrative side. Perhaps "horror" was mislabeled, and "comedy horror" might have been a more apt description. Critically, maybe the angle I'd like interactive livestreams to be taken in wasn't the intent of this series. It was definitely enjoyable, but maybe I was looking for something that wasn't put there in the first place.

The moment that turned it around was this:

This is when Generation Loss became what I was looking for.

Everything about this moment works spectacularly. Charlie's almost immediate transition from silly jokes about toy racing cars to guttural screaming; the delayed, almost confused reaction from Ranboo; the cut straight back to the jokes, leaving the audience to digest what just happened, alone, with no-one on screen to help us through it.

This simple 10 seconds made the entire episode work. We now have a frame story. What we're seeing isn't reality (and as we later learn, is a literal show), and occasionally we see through the gaps in the curtain. Suddenly, the goofiness can be leant into. We can lean into it as hard as we want; there's no bearing on what's actually happening. Then you're sat there, laughing at streamer shenanigans and jokes, with a subdued sort of horror that you'll never know when the curtain will be pulled back again.

My main wish for this episode was that the curtain was pulled more effectively. Each streamer more than adds to the comedic side to the stream, then when it was pulled (or at least, when I assume it was), I don't think it landed as well as the operating table. 

Some examples are the deaths. Ethan's stands out to me, as one that gives me some of the most mixed emotions. Just as itself, watching Ethan die off-screen, only hearing his voice, while Ranboo and Sneeg stand and barely react to it in stark contrast to Austin's panic, works extremely well if you look at it as a scene out of context.

The problem is, I think it breaks an established rule. The rule being, as far as I can tell, that while the show is running everything is seemingly inconsequential. Once Ranboo wakes up, and both of us learn of the show masking everything, we're free to see the reality under it, making us more similar to each other than he'd like.

On the operating table, we're given a precedent for what green slime actually is. Now, any time we see it, it's in a very different light, and entirely recontextualises the first episode.

But now when Ethan dies, we... do see blood? I was under the assumption that blood was censored on the show in some capacity, and the glitches are the show breaking down and getting a brief slice of the reality of the situation. If it isn't, what happened with Charlie? Did this one death in particular make it through the censors, for some reason? Did it have something to do with the setting adjusted on Ranboo's mask before this room was hit? If so, it seems like a bizarre choice, both in-universe and for the narrative impact it had.

We return to some of these spots in the next episode. It feels like a missed opportunity to not play off these moments as a fake-out on the show-side, and then discovering they were actual deaths when the reveal's made. Instead we have people dying in gruesome manners, to then reveal they're... still dead. It's an alright reveal in the context of the line between reality and fiction being blurred, but one that could be much stronger.

All of this isn't to say that every death needed a moment where the line between show and reality is crossed. Vinny's death is a perfect example. It's a full Looney Tunes bit of being (literally) ragdolled across a room, with cartoonish fanfare, and then met with a hilarious demise of being hit in the head with an anvil. The reality of this... I like that being left to  our imagination. It's a good one.

The death I felt was the weakest was the combined deaths of Austin and Sneeg, getting crushed by a moving wall cutout Ranboo manages to fit through, of which, through many ways that are immediately obvious, could fit several people through with some amount of problem solving.

Was this... funny? Absurd? Are we supposed to laugh? It's played in a goofy manner, definitely, but this was just after Ethan's death. We already know these people are dying by this point, or at the very least grievously harmed, so having two people die in succession to then be immediately swept under the rug was odd. After Niki's death, which accomplished a shock death that's moved on from almost immediately very nicely, it felt like a backtracking in tone and redoing a beat we've already seen. 

On top of that, Austin reacted to Ethan's death, and then to the continued lack of reaction Sneeg and Ranboo have. I took this as Austin no longer being controlled in some capacity, so it doesn't make that much sense for Austin to die in a way that has a logical way out. Sneeg's does make sense, having been fully put under again. And going back to the point of the green slime, wouldn't it be much more effective if Ethan died in a way that isn't seen, perhaps only briefly and then cut off, to then see Austin freaking out over "nothing"?

I felt a bit of dissonance. Maybe this was the intent, but I don't think it landed in the right way. Instead of thinking if I should be concerned if that was a real death or not, like Niki's, I was more wondering if I was supposed to be thinking that. I was confused rather than horrified.

To give my fair dues, the moment with Sneeg realising where he was, and his attempted escape, was really good. It's a subtle moment at first, only shown by a glitch and Sneeg snapping out of an apparent fugue, to try to find his way out while pretending he's still under it. Our next curtain pull is Sneeg being dragged back into the show to be reset again while everyone's frozen, which I only fully caught on a rewatch as a literal pause of the show.

Another part of this episode that weakened it was something I didn't even realise would be an issue with interactive livestreams. With The Dollhouse Stream, if someone went on a bit of a joke tangent before moving onto the next part, it was fine. You're here to laugh and it only played into the strengths of the whole thing being a comedy setup. You're going from one thing to laugh at, to another thing to laugh at, and now you're on a detour for something else to laugh at that wasn't fully planned. The beats feed into each other.

But with Generation Loss, I was wanting everyone to move on so we could see the next horror beat. I wanted to be on the edge of my seat wondering what's going to happen next, and instead I was waiting for this line of jokes to wrap up. It was funny, because these people are full-time entertainers, but I didn't want to laugh right now.

Even with that said, I'm honestly not sure where that line should be. One part of me thinks this episode would be much for the better with some tighter pacing, but another couldn't bear to not have my heartstrings pulled by fulltime gay Austin's four children. Not even mentioning his one wive.

And wrapping up what I thought would be a small tangent before I get to the reason this essay exists in the first place, even with some tonal inconsistency and downtime between beats, I adore the details in this episode you only catch on a rewatch. For example, this tiny moment in the second to last room, where Ranboo is tapping out a morse code SOS signal with one hand, to then stop himself with the other.

Now that's sick.

Right; let's talk about why I'm here.

I was delighted to see that in this episode we got some neat interactivity that did have some narrative knock-ons. I was, finally, seeing what I came here for! Thrilling! 

The critical moment of interactivity is the carousel, at least for the narrative, of which we get to choose two people to save and bring with us for the rest of the episode.

Yes, of course, our choice to save Niki gets her killed, but isn't it nice to play a part?

 If we chose someone else, we could have got some pretty different improv sections or possibly new plot beats entirely. It's a good way to add some narrative branching while still progressing through a defined story with one ending.

The other interactive portions of the stream lean into one of my favourite parts of narrative design, of tying game mechanics to the story you're telling. Where the first episode takes on the style of an adventure game, the second is more akin to a gameshow. "Show" is the key word here, and the crux of the whole frame story this episode introduces. We're watching a silly little show, with some silly little entertainers, playing some silly little games that have absolutely no bearing on any possible reality. At all.

And since we're entertaining ourselves with something so mindless, not really caring about what's happening behind it, some equally mindless and pointless games would be a perfect supplement for this show. At first I wasn't a fan of these game sections, until I started to think about why they'd be put there. It's padding. A distraction. It literally covers the entire screen, demands your full attention by not allowing the story to continue until it's done, all to take your mind off what you're looking at and any discrepancies you might have seen before. It's not obvious, initially causes some friction, and really elevates the medium it's in once you start thinking about it a little deeper.

This is what I'm here for; this is the potential I saw.

With a very nice ending to round it off, and a full reveal promising the horror to run deeper as we continue on, my cautious optimism on how this would be wrapped up persisted.

Episode Three

Episode three is the tonal peak of the series, and by far the strongest episode. It strikes the perfect balance between humour and horror, and really shows the strengths of interactive livestreams as a narrative medium.

It starts almost immediately where we left off from the previous episode, tilting further away from comedy, and then sets us on a slow descent into absolute horror. This progression is done wonderfully. There's even a few sporadic jokes that land during the shift, before committing to it entirely by the ending.

My worry was the overarching story would not land. That there would be one huge lore dump explaining every detail of this corporation behind everything we just had to know. Instead, it's kept pleasantly vague with enough details for us to fill in the blanks from the previous episodes, and add some fantastic context that makes the whole series' worldbuilding stronger.

And a genuine question, did Charlie get acting lessons at some point? His swaps between goofs and terror are stunningly natural and lad's got some pipes on him that fully convinced me he was scared for his life.

Subtlety is the last thing I expected to be impressed by during this. Instead of having its messages laid out explicitly by one character going on a years-long monologue, they're told through environment, character reactions, and from details we've caught previously. Instead of spelling out a message on how streamer personalities are seen by others, you can show us a literal commodification of going live from derelict storefronts.

Cross-stream invasions will never get old. Ever.

This episode is where the series starts to make a fantastic use of every part of the medium it's in. Namely, as a filmed medium, between excellent shots of the live portions, especially during the chase scenes, to some near-seamless cuts to the prerecorded cinematics.

This is the first livestream I've ever said: "Wow, the cinematography's fantastic."

And hilariously, for the episode that ended up being my favourite, is the one with the least amount of actual interactivity. There's only two choices the audience makes, and both are extremely well-placed and well-done. It shows so well how it's not how much interactivity you shove into a medium that enhances it, but when and why you use it.

The first one is a subversion. Everyone loves subversions. We make a choice, but Ranboo now ignores us entirely. By doing so, and revelling in his newfound freedom, Ranboo condemns himself with the wrong choice.

Is it better for us to be in control of Ranboo? Should we be?

There's even subtle storytelling that doesn't come from an interactive moment directly. One happens during the final cinematic before the last choice. This one tiny moment, that I didn't even realise was there until seeing brief mentions of it in chat.

There's an exit sign that Ranboo misses.

And, critically, there were people in the audience who didn't.

Consider us, as we were controlling Ranboo before. There very well may have been moments Ranboo would have missed entirely if not for our choices to bring them there. If we were still in control, could we have sent them that way? Would we have been able to? Would it even be considered a freedom, if he didn't make the choice to reach it?

We're now forced to watch him head to one inevitable fate, just as he watched everyone before him.

The second, and final choice, is the climax of the entire series. Ranboo's final send off, after the show's had its run with him, is up to the audience to decide if he should live or die. Even after managing to be free of audience control, to the point of actively rejecting it, Ranboo is still beheld by it to the very end.

There's even a narrative element to seeing the decision shift in real time, told entirely by the audience watching. Chat immediately floods with attempts to save Ranboo, the knee-jerk reaction on being faced with the option to kill them. Then, as the announcer details the actual fate of being left alive, with Ranboo's slow realisation that they'd consider it worse than death, the bar slowly creeps over to the right, flicking back and forth over the 50/50 mark.

And then, as the choice times out, deciding to give Ranboo an apparent mercy, chat is immediately flooded with laments on if it was the right call as the credits roll.

Absolutely stellar.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the first ever narrative-heavy interactive livestream. It's the best one because it's the only one. There's wanes and waxes, with parts that didn't land, some that very much did, and an experience that I still enjoyed immensely, if not mostly on the novelty of the medium, and the obvious heart that was put into every part of it. Quoting myself to a friend minutes after the stream ended:

"i feel like i just watched the second movie ever made"

 And, should Ranboo, Jerma, or literally anyone else pursue narrative-heavy interactive livestreams further, there's so much that could be learnt from and expounded on into something incredible.

That excites me. That really excites me.

Interactive Livestreams as a Narrative Medium

This begs the question: where do we go from here?

I'm pulling away from Generation Loss specifically, and now asking to the question of narratives in interactive livestreams in general. Could we consider interactive livestreams a new narrative medium? Or is it a subgenre of another type of storytelling, with much the same considerations and impacts?

What we're really asking, is this: how does an interactive livestream tell a story through audience interaction? One of the best ways we can do this, is to start making comparisons between interactive livestreams and other mediums, and seeing what lessons we can and can't learn from them.

So, with this in mind, what medium is one of the most famous and wide-spread types of interactive media? What medium is an intersection of many others, and is able to use their strengths and limitations as a story demands? What medium has decades of experience in narrative agency and responding to the choices of someone engaging with it?

Video games.

The Narratives of Interactive Livestreams

Let's analyse The Dollhouse Stream as we would a piece of interactive fiction. It already has many terms describing narrative structures and systems, and the progression of The Dollhouse Stream fits quite nicely into them.

We're going to jump to the first choice made in the house itself in episode one, where the "game" begins proper. There's intricacies happening right up to that point, but we'll discuss what they are in more detail shortly.

The audience's first choice, between working out, going outside, and using the toilet, is exactly the one you think it is. Ignoring the innate comedy of piss, a choice is made, some amount of content happens, and then the stream continues on until the next choice.

This is what's known as a "bottleneck", where a choice branches out, and then collapses back down to a main branch. This main branch, typically dubbed "the golden path" (GP), is the path with the most content, the path a designer tries to guide the player down for narrative satisfaction, the "win condition", or other similar denotation. How the GP is defined exactly depends on the type of story being constructed.

So here's a question: what's the GP of an interactive livestream?

This is where analysing interactive livestreams in this way can only take us so far. The thing is, this idea of branching out and bottlenecking, implies that after the bottleneck, the stream would progress the exact same no matter which choice was made. This is decidedly not true, for many apparent reasons that I'm sure you can see. In an alternate vote where, shockingly, chat decides to not make Jerma piss, he would have had to make very different jokes.

Also, looking at this diagram might imply that the entire stream is put on hold when a vote takes place, like in interactive fiction when a choice is presented and the game effectively pauses until the player picks one. Audience choices are actually running asynchronously to the stream, and the streamers can fill the gap with improv until a choice is decided. Things can even happen mid-decision that has an impact on how the audience votes. Screaming "Please let me die", perhaps.

Instead, the narrative of interactive livestreams put us on an entirely different kind of story.

One type of narrative system is known as "attribute-based stories", sometimes called "quality-based stories". Where a block of narrative content is reached, and based on the choices made during it, an attribute is applied and carried through the rest of the story. These could range from obtaining an item, getting level experience, sating a survival need, changing relationships with other characters, or a literally limitless list of others.

How attributes are used, and when they're applied, is down to the designer. Imagine you go to a pub with the attribute "had a bad day at work". You enter, make some choices, and leave with the attribute "got into a bar fight". Once you return home, you could mention the attributes you gained during the day with your roommate, with some special content playing out based on it. Perhaps "put on your favourite shirt this morning" and "got beer spilled down your shirt". This is an admittedly crude explanation of attributes, and doesn't even begin to look at the narrative complexities it allows, but hopefully gives you a good idea of how they work.

Generation Loss, likely from its initial influence from adventure games (of which, structurally, is almost one in the same as interactive fiction), and later game shows, doesn't stray too far from a branch and bottleneck format. But, this doesn't stop attributes being used effectively, both by streamers playing off improv and making some minor changes to the narrative, even with the ending being predetermined.

Conversely, attributes make up almost all of The Dollhouse Stream's narrative. Every choice, furniture, interaction with other characters, and even audience reactions can be thought of in terms of attributes. One of the most well-known moments of the series comes from something developed almost entirely on attributes:

Jerma and Emilia.

This thread starts once the audience decides to call for "sexy maid service." We're given what was sure to be a brief joke, and are greeted at the door by a maid played by Ludwig, later finding out he's playing the character of non-binary maid Emilia. 

The audience is immediately smitten. They love them. A choice is made to flirt with Emilia, and the rest is history.

Their relationship continues with a date invitation, Jerma sleeping through it, awkward interactions, development with the rest of the cast. And, in a culmination of all of this, Jerma cheats on Emilia with Death, with one of the most infamous scenes in the series bringing up every attribute this relationship's gained up to this point. Jerma calling Emilia a "stupid maid" out of context, the missed dates, every insane occurrence that's happened in this house, all comes out in this one moment, and it's just as impressive as it is the funniest shit I've ever seen on Twitch.

You don't know how high they can fly.

Emilia was intended to be a small gag. Instead, through audience popularity, and building a whole story on nothing but attributes, they became a critical character of the series. By playing into each other, the audience and streamers have, very effectively, created an entirely new plot thread for the stream to follow, which has had sweeping effects on the entire narrative.

This is a level of interactivity that games could only dream of. Sure, you can always comment on the player picking up the green sword instead of the red, but can you comment on their emotional response to that decision? Their thoughts on not taking the red? If we become fixated on it, are we then able to reference it as a cute nod or critical plotpoint, and change the future of the game based on it? If the audience doesn't care, can you drop it entirely, and bring in something else you have prepared?

That level of narrative fidelity is nigh-impossible to hit in a video game. There's a reason games that get even slightly close to emulating this, like Disco Elysium, are revered as technical marvels.

Let's consider how this could be applied to another technique used by games to deliver as much interactivity as possible, while cutting back on the amount of assets needing to be created. Rather than scripting entirely new locations and environments for every choice made, choices are instead put back on the characters. The same general series of events take place, and what changes is how the characters react to them. They can change the narrative based on if they're the one to perform an action, if they do an action at all, how their relationship with other characters pans out, and, if the story calls for it, if a specific character survives.

In interactive livestreams, these characters are no longer AI reacting to scripted events you meticulously plan out to land. These are real, actual actors who can respond, adjust, and create new content on the fly based on previous attributes, with the only real limit being their skill as an actor. Most importantly, they can improv their way out of something going entirely off-rails, and possibly make something even better than the original plan. 

This was starting to sound familiar to me. What other medium have stories created through a two-way relationship between separate parties? What other medium requires everyone involved to be fully playing in the headspace of the story, and be willing to bend, and possibly break it?

TTRPGs.

An interactive livestream manages to create the hyper-personalised story of a TTRPG, with choice mechanics of video games, combined with the visual spectacle of theatre and film.

And that's thrilling.

Structuring the Narrative of an Interactive Livestream

Let's temper our excitement for a minute, and bring our attention back to the concept of a GP. A GP, as we saw earlier, isn't really a structure we can apply to interactive livestreams. Even if we meticulously plan out everything to the minute detail, one improv'd line could throw the entire thing off. And if we do want to make something to that end, we could just, you know, make a scripted show. It doesn't exactly fit the spirit of an interactive livestream and what it could do.

So as much as interactive livestreams can lean into being a live medium and using improv to carry it, they still need to tell a story, especially if it wants to lean heavier into the narrative side over improv comedy. 

I'm proposing a term of "golden nodes" for interactive livestreams. This takes the idea of a golden path, but shifts it to better fit how interactive livestreams come to be. A golden node is a piece of content that must be hit at some point. Either because they are the ending state of the stream, enough preparation has gone into them that it would be a catastrophic waste of money to not show it, or has critical plot beats that forwards the story being told. How we get there (in terms of making a complete story, and less so on how good it will be) is irrelevant, and where something entirely unplanned can crop up.

We could try running through The Dollhouse Stream and categorising golden nodes, but this is something you can't really define with something so heavily reliant on improv. What we might think was a golden node might have been improvised on the day, and something we think might have been made on the spot had weeks of planning. Sometimes it's obvious, like organising a bear attack complete with a bear costume, or having a whole lighting setup for a party, but when so much is made up on the spot, it becomes much harder to define which is which. And often, it's a bit of a pointless exercise, and more of a fun fact you hear in the BTS.

On the other hand, as you would expect from something much more focused on telling a pre-planned story, Generation Loss is much heavier with its golden nodes compared to The Dollhouse Stream, and much easier to guess which were planned and take stabs at what was improvised live. I actually wanted to take a stab at mapping the whole series out, complete with attributes gained, used, and estimating which nodes were golden, but...

I've spent far too long on this already.

A few notes I did make on the deaths in episode two, for the curious:

Niki was voted by the audience as the first choice to be saved. If the any-person voted was the one to trigger this, Austin, Ethan, or Niki could have died first.

Vinny's death is a cinematic dependency. Unless multiple videos were shot for it, Vinny had to die at that point.

Ethan's death could have been anyone

I'm personally convinced Sneeg was railroaded to survive until the end, given how well his reset state plays off Ranboo's new emotionless performance.

Keep in mind, this is entirely from my own perspective as someone watching from the outside, and approaching it from the perspective of a narrative designer trying to maximise unique outcomes. I've had to make several assumptions here and I could be entirely off-base.

Despite my crashing out, mapping the livestream out like this shows how rail-roaded episode three is, to the point you can actually draw a solid GP for it. It also shows that, even with many golden nodes to hit, episode two manages to have quite a few moments that could have gone differently based on audience choice. At least, if my assumptions are correct.

So, this leaves me with a proposed set of terms for discussing interactive livestream. Interactive livestream are built around "nodes"; chunks of content that have been explicitly planned out and prepared for before the stream begins. Some of these are golden nodes. Golden nodes could be anything, but are things that must be hit before the stream is over. Other nodes may be optionally hit, and entirely unplanned and improvised content can happen between any nodes. During unplanned segments and nodes alike, everyone (and, really, everything), can gain attributes, which can be brought up at any time to the story's discretion.

Maybe these terms are useful. Maybe they aren't. We'll have to wait and see.

The Limitations of Interactive Livestreams

As much as it's fun to speculate what could be, we, unfortunately, live in a real world with restrictions and limits of what we can do.

One of the most obvious ones is budget, and with the amount of moving parts an interactive livestream has, budget becomes a vital topic to remember. But budget isn't just a matter of money. Consider, if you had unlimited money, and were writing a novel by yourself, how fast could you work? Let's say you write a solid 2,000 words a day, and to you, a novel is complete at 80,000. In this example, you're going to live to 80 before peacefully dying of old age, and start your novelist career at the ripe age of 20.

Even if you had no worries about having a roof over your head, feeding yourself, never getting sick, never taking holidays, and sacrificing every day of your life to writing novels, not even accounting for slowing down as you grew older, or editing, publishing, and the entire escapade on getting your work noticed by others, you would be able to produce 547 in your lifetime, with half a manuscript left over. 

Now consider this when you do have a limited amount to spend and a deadline to hit, and now you're writing something that could have five novels worth of storylines, involves visuals, audio, music, technical implementation, and now considering interactive livestreams specifically, set design, filming requirements, human needs of catering, sanitation, and shelter for your cast and crew. 

Suddenly, two novels of content compared to five looks much more appealing. Interactive narratives not having limitless branches isn't a matter of not wanting to put everything you've got into a project. It's a matter of production realism.

Time is a resource, and one you need to spend just as wisely as money.

This is something very important to remember for interactive livestreams. It's also something to consider for ways we could cut out the expensive parts of one. Could we create one that doesn't have a fancy camera setup? Do we need camera visuals at all, making something akin to a live narrative podcast? Do all interactive livestreams need to last several hours, or can we reduce the scope of time? It wouldn't have the exact same spectacle as a several-hour live filmed show would, sure, but that doesn't mean we can't make impactful narratives with it. Do you know how many eggs we've cracked with 5 minute twine games?

Limitations are also not just a matter of production. We need to think about limitations of a medium itself. A novel, with just text, doesn't have the liberty of showing you something in a visual format, and has to rely entirely on words to communicate the same information. Of course, you can bend and break the rules a little and include pictures in your book, but that starts to cross the line into other formats. Now we're not just a written medium, and have other considerations to make as well. And, generally, writing a paragraph of description is quicker than drawing a picture. The real challenge is making a paragraph just as impactful as a picture in the same spot.

For interactive livestreams, its limitations are a bit tricker to define, being an intersection of so many types of media right off the bat. I'm woefully undereducated of the limitations of filming and live shows, and unfortunately cannot speak to how they would shape how a story is developed. But, what I can do is talk about possible limitations in narrative interactivity. There are a few that jump to mind immediately.

As much as we can talk about audience choice in interactive livestreams, this begs an interesting question, of what happens to the choices the audience doesn't pick. In a game, this is pretty simple. That choice is blocked off, it may have consequences, and the player lives with the choice they did make.

However, games are not performances. They're pieces of media that can be replayed on-demand. If you want a different experience, or want to see what that choice you didn't make actually did, all you have to do is start again.

An interactive livestream does not have this liberty. Once the livestream is over, it cannot be replayed by the audience for a different outcome. Every choice is final, the narrative responds to it, and whatever outcome the then-live audience chooses is the one that's the final outcome for everyone else watching the vod.

In a game, there's often a discussion about how much it should branch around a choice, especially if that choice leads you on an entirely different path with unique content. Someone might not be interested in another run, and unless you really put replayability forward as a selling point, or make it a central mechanic of the game, it's a high gamble that a lot of the content you put a dear amount of effort into will never be seen.

For an interactive livestream, that isn't a matter of content that won't be seen on one run. That's content that won't be seen, period, and is effectively discarded after the stream ends. If we have a story with two immediate branching paths, that's two interactive livestreams worth of budget, for only half the content being delivered.

Looking at this diagram, we can see what content someone sees on one run of a typical branching game. There's a lot they saw, but much more that they didn't. Imagine that this is now the planned content branch for an interactive livestream. Imagine that each one of those nodes is the equivalent to a room in episode two of Generation Loss, and how many uncoloured nodes there are in comparison to red.

Are linear bottlenecked choices the only outcomes for narratives of interactive livestream if we're not depending on improv? Is there an upper limit to how much "true" branching you can prepare before you start hitting the limits of your budget? Can there be an interactive livestream that manages to give several ending options based on the path taken, or will it always have to collapse back down to one alone, or an ending with one diverging choice in the final moment? Does this strip some audience agency, knowing that in spite of their choices or "playing along", they will never be able to change where the story is going, or only making one difference right at the end?

Equally, however, the audience will never know. With a game, an inconsequential choice can always be scrutinised on a replay. Finding out that if you choose to shoot someone, you always miss, and gives you the exact same outcome as letting them live. In an interactive livestream, to the audience, that other choice is permanently gone as soon as we decide to let them live. We will never know what shooting them would have done. It's a kind of choice funneling that games could only dream of.

Compare this diagram, showing a heavily bottle-necked story in a game with multiple runs:

To this one. The same story, now adapted for an interactive livestream:

Interactive livestream are already making use of this. Consider the first choice in episode three of Generation Loss. The scripted event is the audience picking one code, and Ranboo picking any other to forward the plot. The "true" code is chosen when the audience picks it, and Ranboo picks a different one to trigger the security lockdown.

In a game, the first time we play this would have much the same narrative impact, but not so on the second. If we pick a code, enter it, and find out on the first run it's wrong, we remember this on the next. We can try to cheat a little and pick the code we know is correct from the previous run, only to find that no matter what, whatever we pick is the incorrect one. Replay value is a little cheapened.

In an interactive livestream, however, as far as the narrative goes, we will never know anything different. Our first choice is the only choice. The yellow code is always incorrect.

Will audiences wise up to these moments and start to tire of it? Will we get good enough at disguising them and striking a balance between actual interactivity and putting the audience on rails? Who knows. We have to do it and find out.

Here's another thing I've been wondering in terms of limitations, of the kind of narrative setups you can and can't do with interactive livestreams. I mention this, because currently the two story-heavy interactive livestreams we have are based around the concept of an audience directly controlling a streamer, who (and in the case of Generation Loss, not at all times) is aware that they're being controlled and broadcast live.

The Dollhouse Stream takes it in a comedic direction. The entire inspiration of the stream is based on The Sims, with Jerma directly taking mannerisms and inside jokes from the games. Jerma is fully aware of the chat controlling him, and at times openly antagonistic of choices made or not made, but always plays into the character and follows whatever decisions the audience makes.

Generation Loss, as discussed, is the horror inversion of this. Ranboo starts blissfully unaware of the audience controlling them, and the fact this is even being broadcast, and plays into it much like they were making the choices themself. Soon after he learns the truth, he's terrified and defiant of the audience previously controlling him, which marks a point in the narrative of things turning south.

It's pretty interesting to me that both of these are built on the audience being in direct control of a streamer as an extant character to itself, and the streamer fully aware it exists, at least in different capacities. It's like we're already having some meta commentary on the whole medium before it's even fully hit its stride.

I'm certain there's ways to create interactive livestream that don't immediately jump to this as how the audience interacts (the first thought takes a similar thread of video games, where the audience "is" the person they're "controlling", and as a character they and the audience are one in the same), but I also posit this. Does the audience need to control a person? Could they control the environment a streamer is in, and possibly the stream itself? Could the audience be an additional character to themselves, not in direct control of others present? Could we hotswap control between different people on the fly? There's room to explore what the audience actually controls and why.

This is also said with an understanding that both The Dollhouse Stream and Generation Loss are, in varying capacities, commentaries on livestreaming and impacts it has on both streamer and audience. This is excellent, and I'm certainly not calling it a dead-end for interactive livestreams, but I am saying that this medium has potential outside it.

And something else I do wonder about, is the tone of narratives in future interactive livestreams. They, obviously, have their roots in streamer culture and the personalities that have come from it. Each of these personalities, being comedic entertainers, always bring their own jokes and riffs and are predisposed to making people laugh from observational humour. It begs the question, will every interactive livestream have some kind of jokes and tangents to it, and all have some form of improv comedy? Will there be ones that manage to break away from this entirely?

But then I think of some criticisms of video games, of saying that things are too "game-like". Which, to me, is similar to walking into an Italian restaurant and complaining about the amount of pasta. Maybe this is similar. I think we simply don't have enough interactive livestreams to call it.

We need to see more.

We're on the Frontier of a New Way to Tell Stories

This is the point where I fully convinced myself of something I'd been suspecting from the first ten minutes of The Dollhouse Stream. By trying to analyse interactive livestreams as interactive fiction, I was met with caveats and exceptions. As a TTRPG, more caveats. As a standard video game, more. This wasn't a simple matter of treating it as one medium, and keeping in mind one adjustment to make it work. There were sweeping knock-on effects that didn't match with any existing interactive media, and forced me to rethink how to approach it from the ground up.

This is how, I believe, interactive livestreams sets themselves apart from other forms of interactive narratives, and into their own category entirely. They are simply something unto themselves. There's many questions here, and they can only be answered by those who will strike out to try them, and I eagerly await those who do.

We are currently seeing, in real time, a new form of interactive media being developed right in front of us. And one I believe, with the right hands and direction, could easily ascend to a point of being considered art through narrative.

I see nothing but potential. There are so many ways to take this medium and I am begging more people to put their hat into the ring to see what the true limits of it are beyond theory and speculation.

But, it needs that direction. It needs people who understand choice in media, and for the love of god, it needs narrative designers at the helm. My obvious bias as a fulltime game designer and solo narrative dev come through here, but there's no other medium that's produced talent better equipped to tackle this.

I'm right here. Someone hire me.

To which my question is: if you're in the games industry, and not instantly smitten by interactive livestreams as a new medium for storytelling experiences, what the hell are you doing?

And if you're not, and read this for whatever reason you did, I hope you can see what I see, and are as excited as I am.