"Turn that down!" Joslyn whined to her roommate.
"No," Kristen replied. "The game's not the same without the sound. It's all about the suspense, and this music is pure auditory suspense."
"Come on, I have to get this physics done by eight tomorrow morning, and it's not gonna happen at this rate. And that's distracting, so turn it down."
"Why don't you take it somewhere quieter?"
"Why don't you go play that game in Perry and Oliver's room? They won't mind."
"No, this is my Slenderhaven," Kristen asserted, indicating the cocoon of blankets around her. "And I've got six of the notes already! I'm not moving."
"Gah!" Joslyn exclaimed, head dropping forward onto her open textbook. "I don't even know how you can play that game; it's scary!"
"Scurry."
"Yeah, scurry."
"I don't know why you're afraid of a game."
"It's the unknown—you don't know who or what Slender Man is, and you can't communicate with him. I feel like, if you could talk to him in the game, he wouldn't be so frightening."
"If you want to play the game to talk to Slender, then you obviously don't understand the purpose of the game," Kristen criticized.
"You obviously don't understand how hard this physics is," Joslyn returned.
"Physics is the devil," Kristen concluded.
Slender Man had hunted for hundreds of years, but it was only recently that he was written off as a legend and turned into a video game.
He was slightly offended at first, but then decided that it would not much affect his hunt. The hunt was all he cared about. Let his prey play their games.
Slender was no stranger to human technology, just as he was no stranger to human fashion—he was the best dressed mystical predator in the western hemisphere after all. So he investigated the game.
The game was the hunt, but it was the hunt from the perspective of his prey. Slender did not understand why the prey would derive enjoyment from this simulated experience. He thought perhaps the meaning of the human term 'game' might have changed; perhaps it now referred to a sort of training program.
If this was so, then the 'game' was preparing his victims for the hunt. Never before had he hunted prey that had practiced being his prey.
It was an experience he had to try. Slender had never encountered a real challenge. He would find the best player of the game, and he would try its skills against the hunt.
"You in here, Kris?" Joslyn asked as she entered the dorm room after dinner. She was met with no reply.
"Huh, probably off fawning over Perry," she mumbled, tossing her bag onto her bed. She looked at it with strong loathing. "Go away, physics, nobody likes you." She dug her sketchbook out of her bag instead. "Alright…shoot, do I have any more lead? Ugh, apparently not." The sketchbook was returned to the bag.
Her eyes fell upon her roommate's laptop, sitting open on her bed. The start screen for the Slender Man game was up.
"Why not?" She moved over to the machine. The pointer hovered over the start button. "But I'll turn the sound off."
The game started. She had wandered around in the forest for almost ten minutes before finding a note on a tree. She was confused when it read in plain typeface, "TURN AROUND, PREY."
She turned her character around, but there were only trees behind her character. It was just then that her screen was filled with static and went black just as the lights went out.
She glanced over her shoulder and was dumbstruck by the sight of the tall, suited, faceless form before her. The last thing Joslyn remembered was a long, pale hand reaching towards her.
"Would you like to tell me why I'm here?" it asked. Slender thought the answer was obvious: it was here to be the prey. It must run and be afraid, and try to get away. Then it must be caught and die. It knew this. It had played the game.
"Okay…I'll take that as a negative," it said. "Would you like to tell me where we are?"
Slender wondered why it kept asking after his preferences on the exchange of information rather than requesting the answers themselves. It was peculiar; other prey did not do so, and most never spoke much at all. Did it not remember how to play the game?
"Are you even capable of answering?" it wondered. "You don't have a mouth to talk with—actually, you don't have a face at all. So how do you see where you're going? You don't have eyes, and you—you can't hear me, can you? You don't have ears! I'm talking to a blind and deaf person and wondering why they don't respond!"
It was wrong in assuming Slender so vulnerable, and it could not be worthy prey without being disillusioned about the abilities of the predator. So Slender held up a hand in the human gesture that he understood to mean "Stop talking" and shook his head slowly from side to side.
"Oh, okay. So would you like to tell me how you see without eyes and hear without ears?"
Slender didn't reply. It stared at him; why didn't it run? It was not good prey. It must be made to run and to fear. Fortunately, Slender had much experience in inspiring fear in his victims. As it watched him, he grew rapidly upward, elongating from his previous seven foot height to a monstrous fifteen feet.
"Wow, that's amazing!" it exclaimed. "But it didn't exactly answer my question. Oh well, I have to ask: would you tell me how you did that?"
Slender reached down an arm as long as his prey's form and prodded its shoulder with a single pale digit, prompting it to run. It looked at him curiously.
"Do you want me to do that too? I'm sorry, I can't, I don't know how…" It gaped at him. "Wait, can you teach me? Is that what you're saying, you could teach me to do that? Omigosh, that would be awesome! I can't even tell you how many times I've looked into a mirror and wanted to be tall and skinny. Although—" It looked at him appraisingly. "—that may be just a bit too extreme for my tastes. Could you show me how to grow to, let's say, five eight? That'd only be like four or five inches."
Slender prodded it again. He repeated the action when again it did not move.
"Stop poking me," it said indignantly. "That's not an answer that I can understand. And I actually have some homework to do tonight, so I can't really spend all night in a forest being poked by an extraordinarily untalkative stranger. So could you just tell me what you want with me, so we can get this show on the road and I can go back to my dorm?"
For the first time, it seemed, Slender had found prey that was a challenge. To his regret, it was not trying him in the way he wished to be tried.
"Come on, you've got to give me something!" it complained.
Slender saw that it's speaking was counterproductive to the hunt. He extended forefinger and thumb and pinched its lips closed.
"Vrmaburballur," it said.
Slender stood and stalked away. He had lost his patience with his prey.
"Hey, wait!" it called as it ran after him, sprinting to keep pace with his long stride. "You can't leave me here—you still haven't told me where 'here' is! Can you at least point me back the way we came so I can go home?"
A tentacle shot out from Slender's back and pushed the prey away. Slender was too annoyed with it to deal with it right now. Then he disappeared amongst the trees faster than his prey could keep up.
"Wait!" it shouted again. When it saw that it had been left behind, it breathed something that Slender conjectured was an expletive. "Fine, I'll just stay here, then." And it sat down with its back to a tree and crossed its arms moodily over its chest.
Slender watched it as it waited; eventually, it nodded off to sleep. It slept very soundly for prey—usually, if prey fell asleep on a long hunt, it slept fitfully with the knowledge that it was being hunted. This one hardly stirred throughout the whole night. It woke in the morning to a dull, dreary day.
"Huh?" It seemed confused as it looked around. "Anybody there? Slender Man?"
It was calling for him? That was wrong. Prey was supposed to call for help, which in turn would not come. It was not supposed to do anything but implore the predator for mercy, which he in turn would not give.
Slender stepped into its view, an action that would make any other prey start, scream, and run—the terror of that moment was the best of the entire hunt.
But when this prey saw him, it blinked in surprise, and then raised a hand and waved. "Good morning!" it greeted him. "What will we be doing today?"
Slender threw up his hands in the human gesture of exasperation, trying to communicate to it that it wasn't doing its job right. It interpreted the motion differently.
"You don't know?" it guessed. "You don't have any plans? Well, that's okay. We don't have to do anything. I've decided that I like you, you see. You've saved me from a night of physics homework and a quiz on optics—you're my hero!"
Hero—that appellative had never before been applied to him.
"Anyway, I realize that I haven't introduced myself. I'm Joslyn. I'm nineteen, and I'm studying to be an engineer. I have a cat-loving redheaded roommate and three dogs back home. I like to draw. My favorite color—"
Slender tuned it out. He would have wished that he didn't have ears to hear it, if he were not already without the members in question.
It eventually stopped talking, but it stared at him expectantly. "Were you listening to me?" it asked accusingly. "I asked you a question."
Slender had missed its question.
"I'll ask again then: how did you end up as a video game villain?"
Slender didn't reply.
"Oh, I guess maybe that's not a question you can answer," it allowed. "Yes or no questions would probably be easier for a person without a mouth to respond too. Right. So…do you approve of your video game?"
Slender thought that this topicality could relate back to the hunt, so he decided to encourage the conversation. He could lead it to understand its role in the hunt.
He nodded.
"Wow! Why, though? Oh, I guess I can't ask that, so…did you help develop the game?"
He had initiated the hunt. He had not converted the hunt into a video game. So he shook his head.
"Have you ever played the game?"
Slender did not need to play the game. He would never be the prey, so he required no practice. He shook his head.
"Too bad; that would be some great irony," it seemed to think aloud.
Slender nodded—he understood irony.
"I don't play the game much myself, but my roommate likes to play it at full volume whenever I have physics homework," it informed him. "She's very good at it, but I've never gotten more than one note. What are the notes for, by the way?"
It was then that Slender realized that he had made a mistake. He had collected the wrong prey; this was not the one that played the game!
Slender would have no more of this prey. He picked it up around its middle and tossed it over his shoulder, ignoring its flailing and indignant noises. He worked his way through the woods without wasting any time, and he soon emerged near a vacant road. It was a quick trip for Slender back to the human dwelling from which he had taken the annoying human.
He deposited the human back where he had found it and rapidly left before it could talk at him anymore.
Ten hours later, Kristen started as all the electronics in the room went haywire and then died. A white, slender hand rested on her shoulder.
To Slender's dismay, he realized that he had finally lost the hunt. The first one had informed its dwelling-partner of its encounter with Slender, and one of them had reached the conclusion that Slender could not hunt if the prey did not run.
This prey did not run. It chattered. No. Matter. How. Much. He. Prodded. It. To. Move.
Slender used this opportunity to utilize a new element of the body language practiced by humans: as he understood it, it was called a facepalm, and he felt the situational context appropriate.