"Welcome to prime time, bitch!"
- Freddy Krueger
The best way to humiliate and destroy a bunch of teenage punks trashing your place was to put them on TV. Yu Narukami and his merry band of Midnight Channel surfers gasped in terror as Shadow Teddie grew to the size of a Friday night creature feature. The giant toy mascot—inflated with pure hatred—reached up into the dungeon's stage lighting with his front paws and pulled down a television set the size of a train car. The glaring lights around the dungeon faded like dying stars as his Shadow powers resonated.
Teddie slowly lifted the TV box over the investigation team's heads as the laws of physics folded on themselves and reality collapsed. The static-filled glass screen spilled out of the box like boiling potion spilling out of a tipped over cauldron. Yu's entire team was taken off the air in a downpour of bad reception.
"This will teach you morons to think twice the next time you go poking the bear!" Shadow Teddie laughed dementedly, his voice booming with horrifying audio corruption.
Their clothes dissolved into electrons. Their writhing bodies slowly melted away into a single pool of flickering silver mud. They screamed as their identities were lost in the brutal transference of organic flesh to analogue airwaves. Their voices changed from human wails to the sounds of screeching microphone feedback.
The entire team was reduced into a puddle of electrical white noise and crushed human ego. The surface of the static created the illusion that the floor had split open to reveal the inside of the world was a giant CRT monitor. Magnified close-ups of human anatomies flickered in the noise, male and female getting equal representation. Fragments of identities and physical features would break through the distortion for a brief moment and blink out of existence. Subliminal advertisements for hot dogs and tacos flashed in split second frames. Every time one fading signal crossed with another, it ended up looking like a scrambled porno channel hosted by Salvador Dali. The team's physical existences were being annihilated in a merciless assault of cathode rays.
The montage of raw humanity playing on the floor could have made for a great sculpture gallery if all the models hadn't been instantly destroyed by electrical interference. Michelangelo captured in pixels.
It was survival of the fittest in the two dimensional puddle. Shadow Teddie ominously waited to see which of them—if any—would win the grand prize on the garbled game show and continue to exist in a higher form. He was almost disappointed when the video signals dissolved completely into static, implying no one had survived.
Teddie already knew it wouldn't be Yu himself. A potential star needed a strong voice that could carry across the media, and he had none. There was no hope for that rich chick who hid in her cage all day instead of stretching her colorful feathers. That one delinquent could have shown some promise if he ever came out about anything. Maybe Chie would make it out of production hell her flamboyant kung-fu…
It turned out there was only one who could be filtered from the snowy cluster of static. She was the one who thrived the most on electonic media. Her photogenic spirit made her the easiest to be televised. She had always craved exposure.
A single small heap rose out of the flat static pane. The ripples of digital snow solidified into the outline of a female figure with long bushy pigtails. The white noise changed back into a transient form of flesh, now toned light pink and twinkling in silver glitter. Rise was an entirely new form of life that had all of her human frequencies filtered out and converted into free airwaves.
Her clothes materialized from the residual interference that covered her entire body like a mosaic blur. Her updated outfit looked like her school uniform had been copied from a broken Xerox machine that only printed in pastels. Her short plaid skirt conveyed the color pattern of interlacing RGB signals. A metal hair ornament shaped like a bunny ear antenna was tucked in the braid of her left pigtail. A blocky microphone headset from about two decades ago covered her ears and framed her smiling angelic face. Her bright amber eyes swirled with grainy snowstorms.
Not bad for a rerun.
From far away, Rise looked like she was wearing a dance dress covered in flickering silver tinsel. Up close, it became obvious that her molecules were disintegrating into static and reassembling themselves in a constant refresh rate. Any quick movement she made left a small trail of electrical glitter dissipating in the air. Any time she blinked, opened her mouth, or changed expressions, her entire face would glitch into a million pixels for a second and instantly turn solid again. She was Max Headroom, except more chic.
Rise was no longer a person or a Shadow. Pixelgeist sounded like a cute name for this extreme form of existence.
Rise glimpsed over her shoulder to the towering silhouette of Shadow Teddie looming behind her. She anxiously shifted her weight between her ankles and swished the back of her skirt back and forth on a simple loop. Her body moved with the same preprogrammed sentience as an Attract Mode in an arcade machine. Her brain was taking a commercial break.
Pixelgeists were only empty receivers in their natural form. They still needed an authorized signal inhabiting their bodies before they could operate under their own will. Shadow Teddie was more than happy to perform the simple procedure, stretching his pinky claw as it transformed into the end of a composite cable.
In this strange dimension that chaotically blended the height of electronic media with the dark corners of Asian folklore, Teddie was part Kappa demon and Rise needed a Risette signal transmitted into her butt.
Shadow Teddie carefully extended his arm downwards. Rise flinched while making a noise that sounded like a surprised girlish "Eep!" crossed with the shrill burst of static an old TV set makes when it's first plugged in. Her eyes flickered bright blue for a few seconds as the analogue signal broadcasted through her body and provided her with what could technically be considered a soul.
Shadow Teddie slowly pulled his hand away. His composite cable transformed back into a pinky claw. Rise playfully shivered her shoulders and patted the back of her miniskirt down her thighs, acting much more lively now that her initial setup was complete.
"I'm glad you came back for a second season, Rise. It looks like you had the best ratings," Teddie said with a nightmarish distorted echo. "I hope you're ready for an all-night marathon."
"Thanks for tuning in!" Rin winked in response.
The physical world was consumed in perpetual midnight. The streets of the Akihabara Station glowed bright orange as a violent power surge caused every piece of electrical equipment on the block to catch fire. Thousands fled in hysteria as all of the TV screens and electronic billboards around them were taken over by a foreign signal and changed to a single still image. The city was plastered with the same repeating ad of an adorable pop idol hugging a giant stuffed bear.
Author's note: Hey did you guys ever see Fight Club?