A/N: *drops one-shot and makes a run for it*
So how about all those dead interns?
I don't really write in the first person ever so this was an experiment in practicing that.
The TD characters do not belong to me, but all the intern characters do!
Enjoy!
The following document was recovered and transcribed from the crime scene during an investigation into the disappearance of interns on the set of Total Drama Island.
Proper clearance is necessary for viewing its contents.
If someone finds this, I did what I set out to do.
I took this job for three reasons: my summer was devoid of anything interesting, I liked the idea of working on a TV show, and I needed to know what happened to my friend Tori.
Mostly the last one, actually.
I had heard very little about the production she was interning at before she left for Muskoka two months prior for "pre-production" training. She'd been very excited in her own way, talking in her perpetually tense voice about how much she'd always dreamed of learning more about the industry, blah blah blah…she couldn't have cared less to read the contract she'd signed in order to become an intern on this new show that no one even knew about yet.
It was being shot on an island. Away from everything. A reality TV show with a bunch of teens younger than us trying to become famous celebrities.
What a sick joke.
The host was some dime-a-dozen wash up star who'd been in stuff I hadn't seen, a handful of bargain bin made-for-TV movies or whatever. She'd described him as greasy looking and intimidating back when she still sent letters every few days. The island had no reliable phone lines or internet connection, so calling wasn't an option.
Seeing the man for myself after stepping off the dinghy, partly burnt boat, I knew right away she wasn't lying. Armed with only my suitcase and the clothes on my back I swallowed dryly and stepped onto the dock.
"Welcome!" his cheery voice exclaimed for all nearby to hear; that group consisted of his loyal henchman Chef and who I would soon discover to be the head intern, Rick, who gave off his own weird energy but turned out to be nice enough, for now. "So great to have fresh meat-I mean a new face joining us here on the crew!" Our host flashed a smile that could have blinded someone if they looked through a camera.
I tried to appear as neutral as I could. I was on a mission, I had to keep myself together. "Thanks…" I said with hesitation.
Rick looked resigned as he observed from next to Chef, who towered over both of them and was muttering something about a contestant giving him a hard time and how he needed to go lie down.
"I'm Chris McClean, the host of the show, not that you didn't already know exactly who I am," the inhuman human in front of me introduced himself as he offered his hand to shake.
I only understand now, many weeks later, why I felt such a sense of dread upon our hands meeting in what was really a simple gesture.
His beady eyes were like black holes sucking the life and soul out of anything they gazed upon, an effect only noticeable from up close. His hand felt grimy; it was much larger than mine and held tight for a few agonizing moments. I was wearing a ring on my left hand and it pressed red around my finger for once.
"Rick'll be in charge of you." McLean explained, finally letting me go. "My job here's done!" He turned and looked at Chef. "Time to chill, Chef! Those hord'oeuvres won't eat themselves!"
Rick watched the two march off before sighing, his deep voice sounding very tired, and looking back at me. "Come on," he ordered me half-heartedly to follow him to the large tent where the interns hung out when they weren't doing anything else.
There were far fewer interns than I initially expected, and if I hadn't already known what this place was I would've thought they maybe were contestants, given none of them wore anything to indicate they were staff or crew but rather normal clothes for the summertime in Canada. The one thing they had in common was their tired, lifeless expressions and slumped posture as they muttered and sighed to themselves.
Tori was not among them.
"This is pretty much all of us," Rick spoke up. "Home base, essentially. When McLean doesn't need anyone to test a challenge or bring him his three daily hairsprays there isn't much else going on. We can't get too close to the contestants, they're over the hill in the cabins." He pointed in the general direction of a land I couldn't see. It would become familiar later.
"Um, that's great, so…do you know an intern named Tori? Short, kinda pretty, blonde hair, anxious-"
"Oh. Her. She's…well…hm…" Rick sounded more emotional suddenly as he attempted to reveal something. "You already signed the contract, I guess you might as well know…it's not like you'll be able to tell anyone."
"Tell anyone…what?" I asked.
Rick looked off into the middle distance, at what, I didn't know just yet. "…never mind, let's not get ahead of ourselves." He glanced back at me. "I'll show you where you'll be sleeping."
Every time I tried to bring the subject back, Rick deflected to something else. He knew what was going on, as he was one of the original group of interns employed by the network and the last of them standing due to both his skills in leadership and keeping his mouth shut.
Eventually I caught a glimpse of the area where the contestants lived while filming, and one of them even nodded in our direction. She was eliminated early on for being too angry, apparently. "You a guy or something else? Can't really tell," she asked me from afar, her voice fittingly low. "Not that it matters, you're just an intern. But you look confusing." She herself was buff and could have beaten me up easily if she'd wanted to.
It was true that my appearance made for some raised eyebrows every now and again as to whether or not I was male or female, and I myself wasn't always entirely sure, but I wasn't supposed to actually talk to the contestants, according to Rick, so I didn't respond to her, retreating back down the hill.
I was put to work quickly doing menial tasks like retrieving things for McLean and Chef Hatchet or setting up less dangerous parts of challenges. I noticed the number of interns had dwindled already since I got here and wondered where they were all going, as no one was telling me when, or if, they'd be back. And they certainly wouldn't tell me about Tori, who I still had yet to see again.
Every so often Chris would visit the tent to 'inspect how his crew was doing', making comments on things he really shouldn't know.
"How's the boyfriend, he still selling that stuff that makes the world go all funky?"
"Next time you go onshore tell the missus I hope her doctors are treatin' her well!"
"I heard your gran passed, that must really suck. Have a coupon for one of Chef's dining pop-ups, coming next spring."
He winked at the end of that one. The intern he was addressing, a boy younger than me, I could see the beginnings of tears in his eyes, like this was new information he hadn't known before this exchange.
"You really should keep your mind focused on your own work, there, newbie," he addressed me after I, with purposeful naivety, had asked Rick about the missing interns within earshot. "You've gotta have your head on straight or it'll fall right off."
"…but they haven't come back in days," I pointed out. "Shouldn't there be some concern about people disappearing on your shoot—?"
His strong arm squeezed around my shoulders. "What you can't see can't hurt you, is that what the saying is, Rick?" Chris asked.
"I-I do believe that is correct," Rick said with a fervent nod.
"Right. So don't worry about 'em!" He patted me on the back with uncomfortable force. "They're doing what they signed up to do, just like you." His closed smile was somehow more unnerving than his toothy one. "You'll see them again eventually."
I didn't know what that meant.
I wish I'd never found out.
It was a simple enough task. Go into the camera-ridden woods and check for poisonous plants that had grown onto the paths. If there were, chop them enough that they were less a hazard and more an unfortunate environmental obstacle, whatever the hell that means.
The chances of getting hurt were as low as the quality of the ancient gardening gloves Chef threw on the ground after we asked him for some. At least if we did hurt ourselves with the dulled cleavers we were given or by the gnarly looking thorns that would cause unbearable itchiness and pain, it would be recorded from eight different angles.
Maybe Chris was hoping that would happen. Who knows.
I mostly ignored the ramblings of my fellow intern who was also assigned to the task. He was singing to himself some song I hadn't heard before, and asked me about my life and whatnot like we hadn't been in the same room together before when we had been several times in the past month.
"Are you first gen Canadian too? My parents both came from other places and met here, what are the odds of that?"
Half true.
"Has your hair always been that short? It's nice! I haven't worn my hair short in a few years, I kinda forgot what it felt like." He laughed a little after that one.
My hands had unconsciously gripped the cleaver tighter.
I'd cut my hair at the beginning of the summer with scissors that had been sticky from no one cleaning them off in the decades they'd sat in the cupboard. It's also hard to see what you're doing when your eyes are blurred from crying for nearly two hours straight.
Was I going to tell him this? No.
And when I didn't, he went back to his singing. Apparently he knew not to push.
Without his constant barrage of mild interrogation, I could concentrate on the issues at hand once again: production was moving at a snail's pace, and I still had no answers on where on Earth Tori or the rest of the interns had gone.
Chris must know something. He has eyes everywhere, there's no way he hasn't noticed anything weird happening…
When the singing abruptly stopped, I started paying attention.
"Not funny, KC, where'd you run off to?" I called out into the dense woods.
No response.
Unsettled, I continued forward, looking all around me for the bright blond hair I had been ignoring for the past hour. I spotted at least four cameras staring me down in the process.
His voice startled me, nearly causing me to slip on the leafy ground. "Viera! Over here!"
He had managed to hurt himself by stumbling over a slick spot along the side of the path and into a wildly out of control clump of tall bushes. He was holding his ankle and clenching his teeth. I sighed loudly at his stupidity. "Are you hurt?" I asked half-heartedly.
"Ankle might be busted," KC said through the pain. "But I can probably stand, ugh, I just need a lil' support-." He tried and failed to stand.
"I didn't sign up for this…" I pulled my garden gloves off and pocketed them before hoisting him up. There was a fallen branch nearby that would be a suitable crutch until we could get him to Nurse Chef.
My eyes locked onto the nearest camera set in between the leaves of a nearby tree. "Hey, we got an injured intern out here!" I yelled at the lens pointed towards us. "I know someone's watching all the cams, send us a cart or something! I don't get paid enough to drag him back on my own!"
There was no response, obviously, it isn't really possible to talk through cameras that far away from the main setup of loudspeakers that Chris used to shout at contestants.
KC had stopped complaining about his ankle now that he was crutched, keeping the weight off the injury. "Aw come on, am I that much of a burden? I could probably dog it to camp on my own…ow, you don't have to be mean about it-"
A hard, distant clattering sound cut him off.
I left his side to check for the source of the noise. For some reason it made my stomach clench; it wasn't a normal forest sound, that was for sure.
The noise happened again, past the bushes that KC had fallen through. I used my cleaver to cut them away.
"What the…" I squinted at the tall shadowed… something poking through the foliage on what looked to be the edge of the island. I went back for KC and we advanced together.
"Haven't seen that structure before…and I've done this job loads a' times," he said with surprise. "Some sort of
weirdly tall shed by the cliffside…weird."
Letting my morbid curiosity and suspicion get the better of me, I started towards the shack. Signs greeted me as I grew nearer; really, they're more like rudimentary boards nailed to branches shoved into the ground than anything out of a hardware store, not helped by how they were tangled up in vines from the nearby trees.
"Hey, wait, don't leave me over here!" His voice echoed from the spot where I'd left him leaning against a tree trunk with his stick barely holding him up.
The clattering had turned into a duller, chunkier noise. Similar to the chopping of wood.
My footsteps were so much louder as the woods gave way to a small clearing that led to a drop off into the water below. It wasn't as dramatic as the thousand foot cliff, but would make for a nasty fall if one wasn't careful. The winds coming off the water whipped around fiercer than they ever had, and I almost lost my footing after crossing the tree line. The path that crawled up to the shed was eerily smooth, well-trodden.
I turned to check if KC was still calling after me, but I had already moved out of hearing range, and the wind was like a hundred wailing cries weaving their way towards the shack. "I'll get you later, or maybe Chef will bring his golf cart around after all," I told myself what I would've told KC if he could hear me and forged ahead.
The shed had one tiny window blocked up by wooden boards and a curtain on the inside, so I couldn't see if anyone was there.
I felt my heart begin to race as the door grew in my view.
Thunk.
A muffled, tired sigh followed by rustling.
Drip, drip, drip…
Someone's in there, I realized, keeping my dull and likely useless-as-a-potential-weapon cleaver in both hands close to me. I rapidly felt ill; the wind had begun to die down to a low howl. What is that awful smell?
Creak.
A door had opened…
I stopped breathing in that moment.
I watched as a tall figure…wait, no, it wasn't just anyone…
"If he wanted to get rid of them easier, he'd give me something other than a fifty year old meat cleaver," he groaned to himself as he lugged a large, wet sack across the grass and to the edge of the cliff. He wore a mask over half his face, but it was him.
If I had turned around and found KC again at this point, I wouldn't have had time to write all this down.
I would not have found the missing interns.
But I didn't. I had to keep watching.
I looked around the shed just as Rick was about to throw the bag off the edge. My hands were shaking, my throat burned as I kept the meager lunch I'd had from coming up as the awful stench strengthened tenfold with each gust of wind.
The bag flew up into the air in an arch until it hit the water with a splash!
…he's spotted me.
The next section was the most difficult to recover, as it was torn out and ripped apart prior to investigators discovering the pages of frantically written notes inside the remains of the shed. Thankfully, an intern at the station was able to piece most of it together.
Dots represent missing parts of the text.
It's been at least an hour since I entered the shed and hid under the table at its center. The knocking on the door has ceased; Rick seems to have given up for now on getting it to open. He'll probably be back.
.
.
.
I demanded to know what he was doing, what was in the bag, everything.
.
.
.
.
He won't let you leave now. I didn't want you getting involved-"
"So you wouldn't have to kill me."
"…it's not like that-" He was walking towards me. I only just noticed he was wearing black gloves.
I backed up, holding my cleaver in front of me defensively. "You have blood on your face, Rick, how hard is it to figure out? You've been taking our fellow interns and—-" I swallowed dryly.
Rick sighed. "They're already gone by the time I get to them, most of the time. Or they're in so much pain they ask for it. It's not gotten any easier, but…it's better this way."
I shook my head. "You don't believe that."
.
.
.
.
.
He told me where she was when he found her. It was below a rope bridge that had snapped
.
.
.
.
.
He's back. I hear him. And someone else is there too.
I'm not going to hide anymore. My fellow interns deserve more than my fear.
.
.
.
.
.
The author has been confirmed to be one of the many victims of the hazardous conditions and subsequent coverup on the set of the show, as well as the last, as production was shut down while authorities searched for evidence.
The head intern Rick was found to be the main culprit and has since been sentenced to jail time for the deaths of the interns under his supervision.
The show runner Chris McLean was fined for the poor working conditions and ordered by the court to fix them before the show could continue filming. The case around his specific involvement with the deaths was dropped after his testimony in Rick's trial concluded.
That's that! Reviews are always appreciated.
Viera's pronouns are she/they if you mention them btw! No one actually uses any to refer to her in the story, so I thought it worth mentioning down here.
I have two TD stories I'm catching up to their AO3 counterparts right now (I'm more active there nowadays tbh), one is a post-canon Jo-centric fic and the other is a crossover with the Legend of Korra that is occupying my whole writing brain right now lol. Check those out if they sound at all interesting!
Laters *dives back into the portal*