A/N: Only 196 chapters in and I FINALLY write a chapter about the Schmidt family playing Among Us. Better late than never, right? Also, adding Alex and Meghan means we can round out the numbers to a nice even 10, which is perfect.
The following Among Us games will be based on streaming session by Alpharad and his circle of friends where they play several games of Among Us every Monday (Mongy Mondays). I don't normally care much for Among Us, but those streams are a real treat to watch and give me plenty of good content for an Among Us-based chapter.
ThePencilDude: I am NOT going to write Fritz as a furry, end of story. Thing that could be related to sex and sexual stuff is one of the few categories where the kids have maintained their innocence, and I adamantly refuse to write anything that could even be remotely considered sexual where the ghost kids are concerned (and yes, I include "furriness" in that category). Fritz might certainly think Roxanne Wolf is cool and pick her as his new favorite animatronic, but that's as far as it goes.
I'm also not going to include the multiverse. I'm not familiar with other people's fanfics, and although it's a ways off yet I'm looking to wrap this fic up eventually. Trying to introduce the multiverse would have the exact opposite effect, and just because a lot of people are doing an idea doesn't mean the idea is necessarily good, or that the people implementing it are good at doing so.
Chapter 196 – Fun with Video Games 7
"Is everyone ready?" Liz asked as she clicked the game on her computer.
"Yeah, I'm good on my end!" Fritz replied.
"Me too!" Cassidy agreed. For the next few seconds, the members of the Schmidt family gave their confirmations that they were ready to play.
Mike grinned. "Excellent!" he declared. "So all we need are Alex and Meghan to join us, and we'll have a nice round number of 10 for this session of Among Us."
"Yeah, I'm glad they're around to play," Charlie agreed. "Otherwise 8 would be a really awkward number, cause 1 impostor would probably be too easy for the crewmates and 2 impostors would probably be too easy for the impostors."
"And they're on voice chat too, so they can talk with us no problem," Gabe added.
Normally, the Schmidt family would be happy to play their games in the same room with everyone next to each other, but this would've been a terrible idea for an Among Us game, especially when the players were a group of kids who were prone to showing their emotions openly to everyone else. Thus, the family had scattered to different corners of the house. Mike had holed himself up in his private study, while the ghost kids were in different places ranging from bedrooms to the dining room to the basement. Hell, Fritz had gone so far as to hide himself all the way in Mike's workshop garage, which thankfully for him received Wifi just as well as any other location on Mike's property.
"Oh, speaking of which, here they are now!" Jeremy exclaimed as Alex and Meghan's Among Us avatars manifested into the dropship room. "Hey, guys!"
"Hey!" Alex replied back over voice chat. "Thanks for inviting us!"
"Yeah, it's great to be here playing with you guys," Meghan readily agreed. "Among Us is so much fun when you have a group of friends who can talk with each other over voice chat."
"Absolutely," Susie agreed, before making a face. "I tried playing a public lobby of Among Us once without any of you guys. It sucked. Hard."
"There's a lot of games that are a ton of fun when you play with friends but are painful as hell to play when you're alone in a group full of strangers," Mike agreed. "Among Us isn't an exception."
"Everyone's ready, right?" Liz asked. "I think I see everyone on here."
"Yeah!" everyone replied back. There were 10 Among Us avatars in the dropship lobby, each a different color. Predictably, the ghost kids had all chosen colors that represented the animatronic they had used to possess. Gabe was brown, Jeremy was blue, Susie was banana (chosen primarily because Cassidy had snagged yellow first and banana was the next best thing), Fritz was orange, Cassidy was yellow, Liz was red, and Charlie was black. Mike was dark green, Alex was purple, and Meghan was rose-colored.
"All right!" Mike declared. "Let's get this game started! We're playing in the Fungle map today, so I've increased the cooldown on kills to 30 since it's such a big map. There's always an Engineer and a Scientist, and there's a small chance one of the Impostors might be a Shapeshifter."
"What do Engineer and Scientist do again?" Fritz asked quickly. "I forgot."
"Engineer can Vent like the Impostors, but they have a 30 second cooldown on it that Impostors don't have," Mike briefly explained. "Scientists can look at Vitals at any time. Both are special Crewmates. Shapeshifters are Impostors who can temporarily transform into other players and trick people into thinking an innocent person is a murderer."
"Got it," the former Foxy inhabitant affirmed. "Thanks."
Mike started the game and the screen darkened. The image of an Among Us avatar holding a finger to its mouth covered the screen for a few seconds, and then Mike saw his role.
IMPOSTOR
Mike smirked. "Great start," he thought. Then he checked the name of the other Impostor, realizing that it was Charlie. The smirk on his face grew even larger. "Oh, even better start. Hell yeah, this is gonna be great."
Unsurprisingly for the oldest kid among them (no pun intended), Charlie was one of the smarter and more competent players both as a Crewmate and as an Impostor. As long as they avoided stupid mistakes or horrendously bad opening luck, Mike knew that the two of them could easily pull off a win.
Of course, that didn't mean he could play carelessly. Mike knew he could probably slip up in front of one of the more absentminded kids like Fritz or Cassidy, but if he started acting weird in front of someone like Gabe or Jeremy, they absolutely would call him out on it.
"I probably shouldn't start killing people right away," Mike thought. "It might be a good idea to build up some trust, get people to vouch for me. And then I can kill them once I have the opportunity."
He directed his avatar down south, past the kitchen and circling around the bend into the jungle. As he entered the mushroom-filled jungle, he stepped over a small green mushroom, which immediately released a pink gas over a large circle-shaped area. "I always get scared when I step on those things as Crewmate," Mike thought. "Cause you could just get fucked by an Impostor at any time."
As the gas cleared, an alarm sound began to blare all throughout the Fungle, signaling that the Reactor was about to melt down. Seeing the perfect opportunity to build up some rapport, Mike walked over to the reactor and waited for someone to help him. After a few seconds, Meghan arrived and worked with him to stabilize the reactor. "Thanks for that," he mumbled. He knew that the Reactor exploding would technically mean an Impostor win, but winning via reactor meltdown was such a lame way to achieve victory that it was something he'd rather avoid at all costs, regardless of which side he was.
Mike briefly felt tempted to kill Meghan, but decided to stay his hand and wait for another opportunity. His patience proved to be rewarding, as Gabe had been climbing down the ladder from the nearby cliff and would've absolutely caught him in the act if he'd been too trigger-happy.
"Will I maybe be able to kill someone here?" Mike thought. The answer very quickly turned out to be a decisive no, as there were several other players (including Charlie, incidentally) who were scattered around the cliff connecting the lookout, mining pit, and upper engine room together.
"I can play this slow," Mike muttered under his breath. "I'll get a kill when I know I can get away with it, and not one second sooner." He proceeded to enter the lookout, faking a task and pretending to stare through the binoculars while Fritz, Jeremy, and Cassidy walked around the lookout. For a few seconds, a Sabotage activated and changed everyone into different colors, but there were still several other people in the lookout and Mike wasn't confident in the slightest that he could kill someone and cleanly get away with it through the vent…especially with an Engineer around.
After a few seconds of not accomplishing anything meaningful, Mike climbed up the ladder to the highest cliff where Communications was located. "All right, this is as good of a time as any," he decided. "If I see anybody alone in this room, they're dead meat."
He opened the fungus barrier blocking the door…and was pleased to see Gabe alone in the coms. "Oh, my son," Mike snickered and shook his head as he walked up to Gabe and killed him, reducing him to a bisected corpse with a bone sticking out of his body. "You made the wrong move coming up here."
Still, he wasn't done yet. Getting the kill on Gabe might've been one thing, but getting away with it was another. He walked over to the vent (which in the Fungle took the shape of venus flytrap-like flowers) and hopped in. "Where should I hop out of this vent?" Mike thought to himself, as he redirected his screen over to the vent in the lookout. Without thinking, he immediately popped out of the vent…right in front of Susie.
"Oh, fuck me…" Mike groaned as Susie immediately ran off. "I didn't mean to do that." The worst part was that he couldn't even kill Susie to silence her, as his cooldown was still up for at least a good 20 seconds. "All right, well, gotta pray that I can bullshit my way into convincing everyone that I'm Engineer."
He climbed back down the ladder leading to the reactor, which started to fire off its alarm as he reached the bottom. Multiple crewmates had gathered at the reactor to fix it, but before they could do so, a dead body report heralded by the sound of a horn-like conch interrupted the emergency.
To Mike's abject surprise, no less than three bodies showed up on the Dead screen. There was Gabe, which was to be expected as Mike had killed him himself. But he wasn't expecting to see Alex AND Cassidy show up on the dead body screen too.
"What the shit?" he spluttered. "Three dead bodies already? This was just the first round!" He didn't even have to fake his surprise; clearly, Charlie had been far more aggressive and vicious in picking up kills than him.
"Yeah…I didn't realize how many dead bodies there were, either," Charlie "admitted," marvelously faking her surprise at the turn of events.
"I saw Alex's dead body at vitals, but report already got called before I could report it" Jeremy reported grimly. "I didn't see anybody around, though. Either they vented out, or that body's been dead for a while."
"I was at binoculars for a bit," Liz reported. "I think Susie was around there, too."
"I was in comms and saw Gabe's dead body, and I was the one who reported," Meghan declared. "I got up there through the zip line."
"There was a time when Charlie, Liz, Susie, and I were all at binoculars," Jeremy reported. "A sabotage went off and I was scared we were about to get double-killed, so I left to go to the mining pit because that's a horrible place to kill someone when everyone keeps riding the zipline over it. I had a task there too, so that helps."
"I saw something weird!" Susie reported. "I saw Dad vent out at binoculars earlier!"
"Oh, really? Wanna explain yourself, Dad?" Fritz asked, suspicion clear in his tone.
Mike internally sighed. He'd hoped against hope that Susie had somehow missed him venting, but clearly that wasn't the case. "I will admit that I vented in front of Susie," he conceded. "I'm actually the engineer, and I wanted to show her that if I'm willing to vent in front of her and not kill her, then that means I'm on her side and don't mean any harm."
"Wait, what?" Meghan exclaimed. "He's lying! I'M the engineer!"
"Shit," Mike thought grimly. He had tried to gamble on the engineer already being killed by either himself or Charlie, but that had clearly backfired. Now, all he could do was keep up the charade lest he be immediately ejected. "Okay, we know Meghan's one of the Impostors then, because I'm telling you right now, I'm engineer!"
"Your dad is lying, everyone," Meghan insisted. "I'm the engineer. He's an Impostor!"
"Does anybody know where the vent at binoculars goes to?" Liz wondered. "Because isn't there a vent in comms too?"
"I don't know," Charlie answered sheepishly. "I haven't played this map long enough to figure out where all the vents go."
"I've got sus on both Dad and Meghan," Fritz declared. "But I think I'm a little more sus on Dad right now."
"We skip on seven anyway," Jeremy pointed out. "Let's keep a close eye on Dad, and if we can't find anyone else to put the blame on before the next person, let's eject him out."
"Okay, but if you do that, just vote out Meghan next, because I swear she's an Impostor too," Mike suggested. They all skipped, and the game took them back to the Fungle.
"Well, shit," Mike muttered. "I was hoping one of the people Charlie and I killed was Engineer." One fuck-up that his kids had caught, and suddenly his chances of winning were a lot less certain than they had been a few moments ago. It didn't help that both Meghan and Susie had decided to keep a tail on him and follow him wherever he went, no doubt making sure that he wouldn't try to sneak a kill on him. He tried to fake a task in the Laboratory to try and convince them that he was an innocent crewmate, but they proceeded to tail him all the way back to the central firepit.
"Ugh…I really am not gonna be able to sneak off and do my own thing, am I?" Mike sighed. "All right, you know what, fuck it. I'll set off sabotage, shift into Meghan, kill someone else off and pin it on her. It's the best chance I've got to actually accomplish something."
The sabotage went off, covering every player in purple clouds and transforming them into different colors. Mike activated his shapeshift, transforming into a copy of Meghan, and raced toward Liz. He immediately killed the former Chica inhabitant just like he had killed Gabe, while out of the corner of his eye he saw Charlie go up to Fritz and kill him as well. Before the sabotage could even end, the dead bodies were immediately reported by the rest of the crewmates.
"I saw him!" Meghan triumphantly declared. "I was following Mr. Schmidt during that sabotage, he tried to transform into me and killed Liz."
"I saw that too!" Susie immediately agreed. "I think he was trying to trick us into thinking you killed her instead, but it didn't work!"
"Fuck," Mike thought in his head. "I don't think my plan worked."
"Nice try, Dad," Jeremy snickered. "But we're smarter than that!"
"Vote him out!" Charlie declared.
Without any hesitation, the remaining players all voted for Mike. Seeing that his fate was sealed, Mike let out an exasperated but good-humored sigh. "All right, all right, you got me," he admitted. "But you haven't beaten us yet! My fellow Impostor will avenge me!"
His avatar was placed onto a small boat and sailed out into the open sea…only to suddenly burst into flames and reduce him to a pile of ashes.
Charlie frowned as she watched Mike's boat burn to cinders. She was now the sole Impostor left in the game…and although her dad's play had been rather reckless, she knew that being aggressive was probably the best play he had left considering that her siblings and Meghan had already been throwing sus on him. "At least they didn't catch me killing Fritz on top of that," she thought. Winning a 1v4 Impostor game was very doable…but if she made a single mistake, she'd be joining Mike on a burning boat in the open sea.
It didn't help matters that the moment the round started, Meghan, Jeremy, and Susie were clearly scared enough that they had started bunching together, clearly hoping that if one of them killed each other, the others would be around to report it immediately. Charlie followed them to the lab, pretending to do tasks and look at vitals. "What the heck do I even do here now?" she thought glumly as she followed the group out of lab and through the jungle, trying not to act too conspicuous.
As Susie passed over one of the mushrooms and released a pink cloud, an idea suddenly formed in the former Marionette's head. "If I can catch one of them firing off the mushroom cloud, I might be able to get away with a kill and blame it on whoever fired off the cloud," Charlie realized. It couldn't be something she did herself, because otherwise whoever was left would likely put the blame on her instead.
She continued to follow the group of crewmates, activating the reactor sabotage to force them all into one location. Charlie didn't plan to kill anyone unless someone stepped on a mushroom and released a gas cloud, but she knew that she would have to make her move sooner or later. Charlie and Jeremy normalized the reactor together…and then right as they were about to leave, Susie stepped on the gas cloud, releasing a purple gas that covered most of the reactor area and the area right outside.
"Now's my chance!" the former Marionette thought excitedly. She proceeded to mash the kill button, not even waiting to see who it was, before proceeding to climb up the ladder to put as much distance between herself and the cloud was possible. Her excitement only increased as someone reported the dead body before the purple dust cleared, adding even more to the confusion.
As Meghan's dead body was displayed in front of them, Charlie forced herself to calm down and put a mask of tranquility over her face. It would be a real disappointment if she gave herself away because she acted too excited in front of Jeremy and Susie.
"What the heck happened?" Susie exclaimed.
"I don't know," Charlie replied, projecting a bit of confusion and fear in her voice. "I saw somebody hit the gas cloud so I got the hell out of there as soon as possible. I was already up on the ladder before the body was called."
"Well, in that case, it has to be Susie," Jeremy declared.
"ME?" Susie exclaimed.
"Yeah, you!" the former Bonnie inhabitant accused. "I bet you stepped on that mushroom to let out a gas cloud so you could sneak a free kill on Meghan! And since Charlie was already on the ladder, then it has to be you!"
"No, way!" Susie fired back. "Look, I admit I made a mistake stepping on the gas cloud, but I didn't kill anyone. The fact that you're gunning for me like this makes me think YOU took advantage of my mistake to get a kill on Meghan!"
"Don't listen to her, Charlie!" Jeremy pleaded as he immediately voted Susie. "She's clearly guilty!"
The two of them immediately voted, and it was abundantly clear to them all that they had voted for each other. Charlie let out a sigh. "I'm sorry, Susie," she apologized as she put in her vote, "but stepping on that mushroom was too big a mistake to make."
"Aww come on!" the former Chica inhabitant complained as two votes manifested under her name.
"Anyways!" Charlie perked up suddenly, sounding way too cheerful. "I have a great feeling about this!"
A sense of dread suddenly filled with both Jeremy and Susie as they watched Susie's character sail away into the sunset and get set on fire. "Oh, no…" Jeremy groaned. "Don't tell me…"
"Was Charlie the Impostor the whole time?" Susie asked in horror.
The screen faded to black, and an ominous cadence played as the screen showed VICTORY for the Impostors and DEFEAT for the Crewmates. "What? HOW?" Jeremy exclaimed. "She was already on the ladder when Meghan died!"
"I knew you were too quiet that round," Susie muttered. "But I didn't want to say anything because it would like I was throwing sus around for no reason!"
"We were watching her after we died," Alex commented in awe. "And holy crap, that play was so disgustingly clean."
"Charlie didn't have any sus on her at all," Liz remarked, clearly impressed. "And we could've seen her kill Fritz back then, but we were all too tunneled on Dad to pay attention to her!"
"They gave us the most broken Impostor duo!" Fritz complained. "I mean, Dad AND Charlie? What the hell are we supposed to do against that?"
"And I fucked up the first round too, popping out of the vent in front of Susie like a moron," Mike added smugly. "If I didn't do that, we maybe could've gotten a flawless Impostor victory without either Charlie or me dying."
"Please don't give them Impostor again," Jeremy prayed. "Please…"
The roles were revealed, and although nobody else obviously knew it, both Mike and Charlie had gotten Crewmate this time around.
The same couldn't be said for Liz and Alex, who had been selected as the Impostors this time. "Oh boy," Liz thought snarkily, "I get to relive my serial killer wannabee days. Yaaaaay."
Granted, it wasn't necessarily that she was against the idea of being the Impostor. She was mainly concerned about the fact that she would have to follow the act of Charlie and her dad, who were unquestionably the two best players in the game. And while Alex wasn't incompetent at the game, he wasn't amazing at it either.
Once the game loaded, the former Circus Baby inhabitant meandered aimlessly around the beach and the firepit for a few seconds, with Alex a short distance away. She tried to see if anybody was isolated enough for her to get a sneaky kill on, but with multiple crewmates still wandering around the same area, any attempt to kill was basically asking to get exposed and voted out even if she activated the shapeshift sabotage.
After a few cycles of circling around the left side of the Fungle map, Liz suddenly got a text message on her phone. She was fortunate that she was alone in her room without anybody around to pick up on her odd behavior, so she opened the text that Alex had sent her.
Alex: Hey, wanna do a funny bit where we kill people at the reactor and ONLY at the reactor?
Liz thought for a moment…before shrugging and replying.
Liz: I'm in, let's do it.
As the crewmates finally started to break away from the firepit, Liz followed Alex up on the zipline to comms and climbed all the way down the ladders to the Reactor. To her surprise and delight, Charlie was alone in the reactor doing some kind of task with nobody around. As they entered the reactor room, a wall of mushrooms grew and blocked off the only available exit. Liz raced forward and killed Charlie, before hiding away in the venus flytrap-like flower that made up the map's vents. Alex followed shortly behind her, and the two of them parted ways. Liz manifested in binoculars once she was sure nobody was around, while Alex popped up in comms.
Barely a few seconds after Liz opened the binoculars, Charlie's dead body was reported.
"Well, well, well…" Jeremy drawled, sounding utterly unsympathetic. "Looks like the winning Impostor of last game died on the first round on this game. Oh, the irony."
"Can't really blame the Impostors for getting revenge for last game," Gabe admitted. "Unless it's Dad again."
"No, it is not me, Jeremy," Mike immediately denied. "Where was the body even located?"
"Reactor," Meghan answered. "Didn't see anybody around Charlie's body though."
"I was throwing a frisbee on the beach," Fritz reported.
"I was doing this weird task in the lab where you have to make a crystal out of five pieces," Susie added.
"We don't have enough information right now," Liz suggested. Part of it was to throw her friends off a little, although she would've honestly made the same suggestion even if she'd been a Crewmate. "Vote to skip?"
"I'm good with that for now," Mike agreed.
One by one, all of the players voted to skip, and the game returned to the beach.
Alex snickered once he was sure that he was muted. He'd completely gotten away with his Reactor kill scot-free, and he was looking forward to continuing the streak.
This time, he didn't stick with Liz in his maneuvering around the map. Instead, Liz took the zipline up to the high cliff where comms was located, while Alex circled south of the laboratory and entered the Fungle through a roundabout way. There were other Crewmates there, each going about in random directions, and although he and some others did trigger a few purple gas clouds from the mushrooms he refrained from killing anyone until he had arrived at the reactor. When he got to the Reactor, Liz was nowhere in sight…but he was delighted to see that Meghan was alone at the reactor.
"Oh, sis," Alex shook his head in mock sadness. "Sis, sis, sis…you picked a horrible time to do a task in reactor."
He walked up to her, killed her immediately, and vented away. A few seconds later, Liz and Susie arrived at about the same time as the reactor sabotage went off. The former Circus Baby was seriously tempted to try and snag a kill on Susie herself…but once she saw the dead boy, she decided against it, and instead allowed Susie to report the body without any suspicion.
"Wow, I honestly thought I'd be the next one to die," Mike commented dryly as Meghan's dead body showed up on the screen. "Glad to see I was wrong."
"You beat me to it, Susie," Liz commented. "I was just about to report the body once I saw it."
"Yeah," Susie agreed. "It's in the reactor."
"Wait, the reactor again?" Jeremy asked in disbelief. "Isn't this the second time?"
"Yeah, I think it is," Alex confirmed.
"Hmm…" Mike's voice sounded a bit more suspicious than it did before. "I don't have any idea who it is yet…but the fact that it's reactor twice now is odd."
"Whoever has any tasks over there, be careful," Gabe warned. "And if there's a reactor sabotage, let's all go together so that whoever the Imposters are can't kill both of us at the same time."
Everyone voted to skip, and the game returned the players to the Fungle map. Liz frowned as she thought about what to do next. Nobody had any sus on her yet, but it sounded like they were beginning to catch on to the gag that she and Alex had planned. Deciding to go do some tasks in some other parts of the map first to keep suspicion off herself, she visited the beach and pretended to lift weights, before doubling back to the dropship and pretending to fix the wires in the panel. As she "finished" her fake task, alarms suddenly blared, signaling that the reactor had been sabotaged. "No way," she thought as she immediately raced out of the dropship and took the zipline up to comms, which was the fastest way she could think of to get to the reactor. "Alex isn't going to try to kill someone ALREADY, is he? Everyone else said they were going to the reactor together if we sabotaged it!"
The former Circus Baby climbed down the ladders on the cliffs to the reactor, and was relieved to see that other players were already gathered there, including Alex…and that he hadn't tried to recklessly murder anyone yet. Liz watched as Mike and Gabe stabilized the reactor, and then all of them dispersed to go back to their tasks.
"I'll come back in a little bit," she thought, "and if there's anyone still here by the time I get back, I'll kill them." She climbed back up the cliffs, briefly visiting the binoculars and the mining pit that the zipline was hanging over, before doubling back and climbing back down the reactor. Alex was also on his way, joining her from the opposite side deep in the Fungle. To her delight, Susie and Jeremy were both in the reactor alone. "Time for a double kill!" Liz thought triumphantly. She activated the mushroom mixup sabotage that changed their colors, and then she rushed towards Jeremy, killing him instantly. She was already making her way to the vent as Alex rushed forward and killed Susie, before imitating her and joining her in the vent the same way.
"Did we get away with it?" Liz thought excitedly. A few seconds later, the round ended. But unlike the previous rounds where it had ended because of a dead body discovered, this time it was because Gabe had retreated back to the council room and called the Emergency Conch in the Meeting Room.
"Nice try, Alex!" Gabe declared the moment everyone had unmuted their channels.
"Crap, I don't think we did," Liz thought, fighting the urge to openly sigh as she shook her head.
"I was looking through binoculars and decided to check on the reactor," Gabe explained triumphantly. "And who did I see…but Alex, slicing Susie even as she stood helplessly in the Reactor. I was wondering who the Reactor killers were…and it looks like we finally found one of them!"
"What?" Alex asked incredulously. "The shapeshift sabotage was up, how did you know it was me?"
Gabe laughed. "I caught a glimpse of you just before you turned into someone else," he explained. He then added, "Also, I have to say, I wasn't 100% sure before, but thanks for confirming it for me!"
Liz and Alex both smacked their faces with their hands. "Dammit," Alex mumbled. "I screwed up, didn't I."
"Thank God we finally found one of them," Cassidy breathed in relief. "I was starting to get worried."
"There was another dead body there too," Gabe reported. "I think this might've been a double kill. I saw someone vent at the same time, I didn't get a chance to see who it was, though."
"One is better than none, though," Mike commented. "We only have 6 left, we needed to vote on someone now anyway."
"Get him out of here!" Fritz shouted.
Everyone proceeded to vote for Alex, including Liz. At this point, Alex's position was basically unsalvageable, and Liz didn't want to risk exposing herself by trying to defend someone who had clearly been outed as Impostor. "It was funny while it lasted," Alex commented, fighting to hold back his laughter as the boat he was on sailed out to sea…and burst into flames in the horizon.
"Crap, now I'm alone," Liz thought. It'd be a lot harder to win the game, now that she was alone and there were still 4 other Crewmates who were still alive. For a second, she thought about just abandoning the "Reactor killer" gag and just play the game normally, but she decided to abandon that idea. For better or worse, she had committed to the bit, and for this game she was going to stick with it.
Suddenly, a thought occurred to her. "Wait a minute…I heard Fritz say a few days ago that he was gonna do something like what me and Alex are doing right now," she realized. A grin slowly spread across her face. "Maybe I can trick everyone else into thinking that he's the other Imposter!"
She walked up to the Emergency Conch and called it. "Someone called the emergency conch?" Mike asked.
"Yeah, it was me," Liz affirmed. "I think I know who the other Impostor is. I think it's Fritz!"
"ME?" the former Foxy inhabitant asked incredulously. "What? Why?"
"Because I heard you talking a few days ago about how you were gonna do a bit where you were going to kill everybody in the same place on this map!" Liz accused. "Who's to say you didn't decide to try that bit now and kill everyone at the Reactor?"
"Wanna explain, Fritz?" Cassidy asked, her voice carefully neutral.
"I did come up with an idea like that, I'll own up to it," Fritz admitted, "but everything else is just completely wrong! First off, the idea I had was to work with another Imposter to kill everyone at the beach, not at the Reactor!"
"Interesting," Mike acknowledged. "Do you have anything else to defend yourself?"
"Yeah, because I've been on the left half of the map for pretty much the entire game!" Fritz continued. "I had like one task in lab and one task in comms that I did in round 1, and after that I was hanging around the left side for the entire time! And I know this doesn't have anything to do with anything, but can I say that this map has some of the best tasks in the entire game?"
"Completely agree with that one," Gabe commented without hesitation. "I love these tasks. Picking up a stick to roast an Among Us figure marshmallow in the firepit, lifting weights on the beach to really feel like a man, throwing a frisbee off into the distance...these tasks are so cool!"
"I know, right? I'm always so happy whenever I see I've gotten a task on the beach in this map," Cassidy agreed. "It doesn't even matter if I get killed while I'm on the beach, because I can still do the tasks even after I die!"
"I can't disagree with a single thing that's said here," Liz freely admitted, not even having to fake her approval.
"Completely based take from Fritz here, and I'm honestly tempted to clear him from suspicion based on that alone," Mike declared. "But go on, Fritz. What else were you saying?"
"Oh, right, I kinda sidetracked us," Fritz acknowledged, before continuing. "Anyways, like I was saying before, I was on the left side of the map pretty much the entire game except for that one time we all went to the Reactor to fix the sabotage. There's no way I would've had enough time to go all the way to the Reactor, kill everyone, AND come back to the left side and stick around there as long as I have."
"You know…I think I can actually back Fritz up here," Cassidy remarked. "I was hanging around with him on the beach and in the cafeteria for a long time. If one of us Impostor, we could've easily killed each other a bunch of times, but we never did. I really don't think it's him."
"I don't have any hard evidence to back it up," Mike interjected, "but I think I have a soul read on who the other Impostor might be, no pun intended. All of you guys skip though so we don't vote someone out by accident."
As the votes came in, Mike's icon fell squarely under Liz's name. "Me?" she asked incredulously.
"I have my suspicions," was all Mike said before the game returned to the map and they were forced to deafen.
"Well, shit," Liz mumbled under her breath. Her attempt to frame Fritz for the reactor killings had completely backfired. Not only had she accidentally cleared Fritz (and possibly even Cassidy) of suspicion, but she had ended up placing herself under her father's sus crosshairs.
It didn't help matters that the task bar was dangerously close to getting completed, and it seemed that the pairs of Fritz and Cassidy and Gabe and Mike trusted each other enough to stick with each other, preventing her from getting a kill without immediately getting exposed for it. "What the hell can I even do here?" she muttered. "There's really no way I can get a win!"
As the reactor sabotage went off and Mike and Gabe moved to the reactor to stabilize it, Liz threw her hands up in the air in exasperation. "Fuck it!" she decided. "If there's no way I can win this game, then I'm going to lose as hilariously as possible. That was the whole point of this bit to begin with, after all."
She waited until the wall of mushrooms appeared behind them, cutting the reactor from the rest of the map…before running straight towards the pair of Crewmates, violently slicing Gabe in half in full view of Mike. Not even a second later, Mike reported the dead body, confirming that he had been fully expecting an attack on them in the reactor and had likely been spamming the report button accordingly.
"Well, well, well…" Mike drawled the moment the discussion screen appeared. "Did anyone else see what I saw just now?"
"Sure did!" Fritz answered, barely repressing a snicker.
"If you mean Liz brutally murdering Gabe in the Reactor, then yep, we caught it on cams!" Cassidy affirmed.
"So we all saw it then," Mike concluded smugly. "Good to know that my soul read turned out to be completely correct."
"Maybe there's a shapeshifter…oh, who am I kidding," Liz sighed, though she was fighting the urge to smile. "Yeah, it was me. There was really no way for me to win at that point since you guys kept sticking around each other, so I decided to just go for one last kill and make it as funny as possible. I actually wanted to kill Dad since he was the one who did the soul read on me, but I timed it wrong and I killed Gabe instead by accident."
"So you didn't even kill the right person?" Fritz laughed. "Damn, that IS funny!"
"I made a big mistake trying to put a sus on Fritz," Liz acknowledged. "Figured at that point I might as well just roll with it."
"Time to vote her out, everyone!" Mike declared. Everyone proceeded to vote Liz…including Liz herself, as her red player icon joined everyone else's under her own name.
"I really regret trying to throw sus on Fritz. I'm pretty sure that screwed me over," was all Liz had to say as her boat flew out into the sea and burst into flames.
A triumphant cadence played as the screen faded to black and VICTORY showed for the Crewmates and DEFEAT for the Impostors. "All right!" Gabe cheered. "We beat the Impostors!"
"I liked the way Liz ended that game," Meghan commented with a smirk. "She couldn't win, so she lost in the best way possible. The fact that she ended up killing the wrong person in what she wanted to be her blaze of glory only made it even funnier."
"That was pretty funny, the way you killed everyone at Reactor and ONLY at the Reactor," Cassidy giggled. "Did you guys plan this beforehand?"
"Not really," Liz admitted. "Alex sent me a text at the start of the round suggesting the idea, and I just rolled with it cause I thought it'd be funny."
"We were actually pretty close to getting away with it at one point," Alex remarked. "If Gabe hadn't caught us when we did that double kill, we definitely would've won."
"At one point, even I have to admit that after a while, the people who died at the Reactor were pretty much asking for it," Charlie admitted. "I mean, you know the saying, once is coincidence, twice is suspicious, three times is enemy action. What did you expect was gonna happen if you keep going to the reactor even after knowing for a fact that it's dangerous?"
"It got a lot harder after Alex got voted off," Liz commented with a sigh. "I thought throwing sus on Fritz in that emergency meeting was a good idea. I was completely telling the truth about him saying he was thinking about doing something like that a few days ago, and I feel like out of everyone here, the most likely person to try and do a funny gag as an Impostor would be Fritz."
"You're not wrong there," Fritz replied with a shrug.
"It wasn't necessarily a bad idea by itself," Alex acknowledged. "You just got really unlucky since Cassidy could clear Fritz, and since I was already voted they couldn't both be Impostors covering for each other.
"Yeah, since I couldn't throw sus on Fritz, I ended up getting sus thrown on me instead," Liz agreed. "At that point, since I knew I was pretty much screwed, I figured I'd try and kill someone in an over-the-top and funny way before I got voted out. Cause losing because everyone finished their tasks would've been so lame after everything we'd already done."
"Yeah, glad you chose to go out with a bang," Susie complimented. "If you're gonna do a funny bit, you gotta full send it to the end. Otherwise what was the point of doing it in the first place?"
"That's one of the great things about games like Among Us, as long as you're playing with friends who enjoy hanging out with each other just as much as you do," Mike commented with a smile. "No 2 Among Us games are exactly the same."
"Who's up for another game?" Charlie asked.
Her question was met with enthusiastic cheers and agreements from her family and friends, and thus did the cycle of sus and Imposters continue for the rest of the day.
/
A/N: This honestly feels like a chapter I should've written several chapters and several years ago. Then again, I'm not a huge fan of Among Us to begin with, and most of my enjoyment of this game comes from watching Alpharad's Mongy Mondays streams.
This'll probably be the last filler chapter. Unless I'm just straight-up swamped and cannot do any kind of coherent research on Security Breach in the next 2 weeks (which granted is a definite possibility), I will probably start getting the ball rolling on the Security Breach arc starting next chapter.
Oh, and one last reminder that I've started posting Mike's New Ghostly Family on AOx3, just in case takes this fic down or starts screwing up even more, for whatever reason.
That's all I have for now. Hope you guys enjoyed!
