Once Dead OCT Round 4: Amy vs Caroline

Two weeks.

Two weeks she laid in her bed, barely able to move, hardly able to even crawl to the toilet when she needed to. Two weeks of barely any food, hardly able to keep anything down except water that she had to drink through a straw. Two weeks of fever, sweating, stomach pains, headaches, limbs falling asleep, throwing up, trouble breathing, a mish-mash of physical ailments that left her body a wreck.

Two weeks since Barlow and Desdemona had found her unconscious in the women’s restroom, passed out on the floor. Two weeks since they had her carried off to her room to recover properly and make sure she didn’t waste away.

Two weeks to have her body physically force out all of the toxins and poisons that she had eaten in the cookie she had eaten for Deadberry in the last round.

When Amy finally felt well enough to stand on her own two feet for a moderate amount of time, the first thing she did was take a long, hot, cleansing shower. It took almost an hour before she felt properly clean. She was in for so long that her hair dye finally faded out, revealing her natural brown hair. She pulled on some new clothes and threw her old ones, which were still stained with Strauss’s blood and specks of her vomit, out the window as far as she could throw them. They stank, were filthy, and reminded her too much of everything that had gone horribly wrong with her life recently.

Amy could still see Strauss’s face when she closed her eyes, and felt a strange mixture of guilt, joy, and confusion whenever she remembered it. Those two weeks of lying about her room had given her time to reflect, in between the nausea and pain, and she had no idea what to think of her life anymore. She had accepted that she wasn’t real, that she was initially been created as just some sort of character, a work of fiction. But now, she was supposedly free, able to do what she truly wanted.

And apparently, what Amy truly wanted was to murder people in gory, blood-soaked ways.

No. No, I’m better than that. That was…that was me defending myself, Amy thought, trying to shake away her feelings. I had to make sure. He could have been freaking invincible otherwise, for all I know! That shotgun…

Right in the center of his face… Her mind drifted, as she recalled in exquisite detail the milliseconds after her gun had fired, as Strauss’s face exploded in a puddle of gore, with blood arcing in every direction, bits of his face exploding, the skin and bone flying off…

There was a loud knocking on the door that brought Amy out of her daydream. She slowly walked towards it and opened it. She saw Barlow, who looked happy to have her finally be up.

“You’re finally mobile, I see!” he said.

“Yeah, it’s good to know that apparently I can survive eight billion different poisons at the same time,” Amy replied. Barlow’s expression went straight from pleasant surprise to regret.

“Listen, all of us in the Hotel were doing our best to make sure that you survived. You had the best possible care!”

“Really?” Amy said, looking around in an exaggerated manner. “Well, gee, this must be the most low-key hospital I’ve ever seen! Seriously, what was wrong with you all? Deadberry could have killed me, and you stand by doing NOTHING!”

“Well, what should we have done then?” Amy tried to come up with an answer, but nothing appeared in her head.

“Fine,” she eventually said. “I…I don’t even care. I’m alive, I’m better, and…”

“HOLY FUCKING CRAP IT’S THE END OF TIMES!” Veronica said, her voice filled with self-satisfied mocking. “The dead have risen from beyond the grave!”

Amy immediately began to shut the door, but Veronica held it open before she could. “Nice to finally see you up and about, Red,” she remarked. “Or should I call you a different color?”

“Veronica, I am not in the mood right now, so could you please—”

“Hey, hey, don’t give me that attitude, missy.” Veronica swung the door open and stepped inside, a small group of spiders following her in from the ceiling. “I run this Hotel, I have to make sure all of the guests are enjoying themselves.”

“Like being force-fed enough poisons to kill Jonestown?”

“Like making sure you get enough antidotes in your system so your body doesn’t go into complete and total shock,” Veronica answered. “Like making sure that some of the other contestants don’t try to remove you from the competition while you’re weak and helpless, as tempting as that may have been.” She waited for Amy to reply. “Listen, Red, I don’t like you. Hell, I don’t think I like ANYONE in this shithole of a hotel, but you, you went right to the fucking top of the list. You call me a liar, crazy, insult me, KILL me, and then, when I help fucking care for you, protected you, help you survive, do I get a ‘Gee, thanks, Veronica!’?”

Amy took a few seconds too long to answer. “You know what, forget it,” Veronica said. She stepped back out into the hallway, making her way to the entrance lobby. “Have fun in the next round,” she yelled back, the venom in her voice almost flooding the hall.

Amy looked back at Barlow. “So, should I even bother apologizing? Or just let her stew in her skewed self-pity?”

“Just…just give her some time,” Barlow replied. “She’s had a lot of things on her plate. We all have.”

“What things? What could possibly be giving her difficulty? All I’ve ever seen her do is feed her spiders, walk around the halls, swim in the pool, and generally have an attitude!”

“There’s more going on in this hotel than just you, Amy,” Barlow said. “There’s everyone else who wants to win, there’s the creators, there’s the hotel itself, a lot of different—”

“Wait. Stop.” Amy bent down and looked Barlow right in the eyes. “What did you say about creators?”

Barlow looked around nervously. “Well, uhm, actually, look at the time, I need to get going, there’s a lot of PUT ME DOWN THIS INSTANT LET GO OF ME!” Amy was surprised at how heavy Barlow was; apparently he had more muscle mass than she gave him credit for. But she couldn’t risk letting him go, not when there was this new information waiting right in front of her. She struggled carrying him over to her bed, where she threw him down and held him in place.

“Now, what were you saying about the creators?”

“I’m not saying ANYTHING! There’s nothing to say in the first place!”

“I think that there’s PLENTY to say, Barlow,” Amy said. “Veronica told me that the reason all of us, excluding you, her, Deadberry, and Desdemona, are here is because we were thrown out. Tossed aside. Left to rot in the Black Boxes by our creators. And now you’re telling me that these same people are giving her enough trouble to make her even crankier and more like a bitch than before? That just doesn’t add up.”

“Why do you even care?” he asked, trying to reason with her. “It’s not important, you and the rest of the guests don’t even need to know!”

“And THAT is where you’re wrong!” Amy shouted. “I was explicitly told that I was placed here because I wasn’t wanted, that this would be my one ticket to meeting the sick freak who created me, and now I hear you talking about creators causing trouble for Veronica, that raises a LOT of questions. And since you’re the sanest person Veronica’s got employed, I want you to tell me as much as you can about this.”

“But it’s nothing! They’ve done nothing that could impact you or anyone else! It’s literally nothing!”

Amy got up, letting Barlow go. She walked over to the wall where she had put up all of her information on people in the hotel. “Barlow, do you see all of this? Do you see all of the information I have made my business to find out? I didn’t do this for fun, because I thought it would be a good way to spend time. It certainly wasn’t because I wanted to be friends with them. Half of the people you have in this hotel are obviously psychotic, mentally deranged, or otherwise emotionally unstable. And the other half are very, VERY careful about hiding it. I did this, ALL OF THIS,” she said, spreading her arms to emphasize the scope, “because I knew absolutely nothing about them. And when I don’t know something, you know what happens?

I get nervous. Because that means there’s a variable out there I can’t account for, that there’s some part that can go wrong. Which results in me dying, or worse, getting sent back to the Black Box. Every single job, every contract I’ve done, I did my research. I investigated. I planned everything out as far as I could, and you know what it’s gotten me? Ten years of freedom, of living the high life, of running my own dance studio.”

Barlow remained silent, waiting for Amy to continue. “I’ve seen what some of the people here can do. They can teleport, they can punch through steel, they can turn into monsters, have superpowers, all these things I don’t have. The only thing I have is…is this. Planning. Information. Being careful. Finding out things and using them as best I can.

So when you tell me something that I wasn’t even aware of, something that can change everything in this messed-up hotel, I get VERY. NERVOUS.” Amy took a few steps towards Barlow, looking at him directly. Look him in the eyes, tell him you need to trust him, she thought. Everything else has been the pitch-perfect “Pity the Poor Amy” song, you just need to close it out. It was so basic that it was child’s play; put herself over as the underdog, the weakling, the one who seemed to stand no chance, begging for one small, minuscule thing that could give her even the tiniest edge over her competitiors. She might have felt a slight pang of guilt at her blatant manipulation of Barlow if this information hadn’t appeared out of left field. “I need to trust someone here, Barlow. Please. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s nothing. But I won’t be sure until I know. Please.”

Barlow sighed. “It honestly isn’t much,” he admitted.

But he still provided.

Just like Amy wanted.




It had been one full month since the cooking challenge. About two weeks since Amy had fully recovered and could move around on her own. And she had been back to work as though nothing had happened.

The information that Barlow had given her was interesting, but she had to agree that it seemed ultimately pointless and unhelpful to her current position. Her own creator seemed to be absent entirely, and the ones that had been there were carefully cordoned off with Desdemona and Veronica’s guidance. Apparently a few of them had even been involved in the previous round, some cooking, and a few going the more violent way of winning. There was even a mention between two big-name creators apparently having some sort of a problem: “Aegy” and “crazyshiro”, a person that Amy would have desperately loved to have talked to.

However, that would have to wait in the future. For the moment, things seemed to be much more relaxed around the Hotel. There were much fewer people around, and Amy had to throw out half of the notes and observations she had. The ones who had stayed, however, were mostly ones she was hesitant about. The Donovan pair was noteworthy solely based on how it would be a two on one fight, something Amy only liked if she was part of the two. The same for Todd and Timothy. And the rest had things about them that made Amy cautious.

She had to get back into shape. Spending weeks bed-ridden and barely able to move had led her muscles to begin breaking down, leaving her weak. Her interrogation of Barlow had all but knocked her out when she had finished. Two weeks spent trying to push herself into shape, becoming flexible, agile, strong, shaking off the rust of her body, and she still wasn’t sure she was anywhere close to where she had been previously.

But still, Amy felt like she could relax. The hotel was on cooldown. The relationships between the various occupants were tense, but that was only to be expected. The creators were off in their own little section, the judges weren’t bothering her, and Amy was slowly getting back into her “A-game”, albeit not as fast as she would have liked.

It was here, obviously, when everything went to shit.

Amy had been doing some basic dancing warm-up exercises, something she routinely did when she was leading a class to make sure everyone was limber and prepared. Halfway through a leg stretch, there was a sudden explosion, which knocked her down to the ground from the one leg she had been standing on. Several more followed, and the lights flashed on and off repeatedly. The floor, walls, and ceiling all seemed to shake independently of one another, threating to collapse in six different ways.

But the worst was the SOUNDS, ghastly, unnatural noises that felt as though someone were trying to turn Amy deaf and insane at the same time. It was grating, whooshing, sucking, blowing, screeching, any and every noise occurring at the same time to make something that defied all of reality, starting and stopping at seemingly random intervals.

Amy grabbed her handgun and shotgun, making sure both were loaded, and tucked her hatchets into her pants pockets, handles sticking out. As she went to the door to see just what new brand of chaos was happening, she noticed a small envelope on the ground. It looked as though it had been pushed underneath the door in a hurry. Opening it, Amy saw only a single picture of a woman, black hair and red eyes, “Caroline Thompson” written in bright red at the top, and the phrase “KILL ON SIGHT” at the bottom, scribbled neatly in the same color as her name.

The sudden appearance of this picture could only mean that a new round had started, but the lack of any sort of announcement, any warning beforehand made Amy cautious, even more so with the explosion and frightening noises. And the handwriting was odd as well; it didn’t look like Veronica’s and “crazyshiro” had used an entirely different style, so who was it from?

She turned around to go find what information she had on Caroline, but when she did, she saw that she wasn’t even in her own room. One of the walls had turned into the locker room for the gym, another was the wall for someone else’s room, judging by the large, multiple blood stains that covered it, while the third was several bits and pieces of different walls all mashed together.

And the ceiling was…nothing. It was literally nothing. There was no thing there, only a pure absence, a lack, an infinite feeling of something being gone.

It looked just like the Black Box.

Amy couldn’t run out of the room fast enough.




Where’s the lobby, where’s the lobby, where’s the lobby?!

Amy had followed a simple plan for the past ten minutes or so: always go straight down the hallway, and if she couldn’t go straight anymore, take the right. The walls around her shifted constantly, more so than in the very first round, when all she had to do was tag someone. The lack of electricity had returned as well, but thankfully it wasn’t as bad as her lobby fight with Whaverd.

She immediately shook her head, trying to get rid of that reminder as fast as she could. She needed to get to the hotel lobby and find the map again. It had helped her in the first round, when the exact same thing was happening, the walls and rooms shuffled around like so many cards in a deck. But now, now there were all those voids that appeared, ominous tears and breaks in the world that made Amy nervous.

A large section of the wall was violently knocked down five yards in front of her, surprising her and leaving her tumbling forward. It took a while for the dust to settle, but the abnormally large bear that appeared through the hole was hard to miss. Amy wasn’t sure at all how to handle its appearance, but something about it stood out. An almost familiar…Barlow? she thought, shocked at the similarities around the face. Why the hell does this thing look so much like--

The bear turned towards Amy and roared, loud enough that it shattered the lights above them. Amy took that as her cue to turn and run. The bear chased after her, gaining ground and looking absolutely furious, letting loose more roars that seemed coated in pain and suffering. Amy turned a quick corner to her left, and could feel a wall slide in behind her, offering a level of protection from the mad beast.

And then it crumpled away into dirt as the werebear charged through it anyway.

Amy ran faster than she ever had before, looking for somewhere, ANYWHERE that would be safe to hide. She had a feeling that her shotgun would only serve as an annoyance to the Barlow-looking beast, and her other weapons would be laughably ineffective at best. Finally, she saw an open door, ahead and to her right, that she might be able to use to hide in. She leaped inside and slammed the door behind her, out of breath and exhausted from all the running she had just did.

“Hello red human woman!” Amy swore her heart stopped beating. She looked up and saw Deadberry standing just in front of her, with four similarly dressed women accompanying the madwoman. “I wan yew to meet my SISTERS!”





“We’re going the wrong way!”

“Carrie, I swear to God, if you don’t shut up for five seconds!”

“Caroline, we should have stayed in our room and waited for Darkus! The three of us can work together and figure out a plan, I just know it!”

Caroline sighed and continued marching down the hall, narrowly avoiding the shifting walls that could squish her like a bug. “Darkus is probably just as confused about everything as we are, I doubt he’d have anything to add to the conversation.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know we need to find this…this…what’d you say her name was?”

“Amy Tolson.” Carrie replied, sighing at Caroline’s single-mindedness. Caroline wished she could just reach inside her own head and smack Carrie on the back of the head, but this Amy girl, whoever she was, was a bigger concern. If Caroline had to kill her, this redhead probably had to kill Caroline.

“Well, where are we going to find her?” Carrie finally asked, a question that Caroline had been hoping could have been avoided.

“I don’t…look, we’ll find her eventually, all right? This hotel’s only so big. We’ll find her eventually.”

“And when you do…you’re going to kill her?”

“The hell do you THINK I’m going to do?” Caroline hated these arguments with Carrie. It was as though the girl in her head couldn’t get over the fact that, sometimes, people had to die, and that in order to survive, others had to be killed. “Just let her run right by me when I have the chance?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say! I just think, maybe, maybe there’s a way where EVERYONE can win, that everyone can meet their creators. Shouldn’t we be worried about these voids that are suddenly popping up everywhere? And the fact that Veronica—”

“SHUT. UP.” Caroline had no intention of bringing up Veronica again. Just a few minutes ago they had run into her, in a basketball arena that was literally covered in spiders, all of which had turned around to face her the second Caroline had opened the door. “We are not going to—”

“RUN!!!” Amy screamed, running right by Caroline in a manic sprint.

“Well…”

“SHUT UP!” Caroline shouted. She looked back where Amy had been running from and saw Deadberry closing in on her, along with four equally creepy girls who were wearing similar outfits.

Caroline caught up to Amy in mere seconds.

“What the hell did you do?” she shouted.

“Oh, like I had to do anything to set those freaks off!” Amy yelled back.

The hallways were shifting more and more as the two of them ran away, creating a complex labyrinth that the two of them were caught in, but could never completely escape the five sisters. The voids began appearing more and more as well, threatening to swallow up one of the two whole from time to time. Only a few lucky jumps and dodges allowed them to avoid being sucked into the gaping maw of the abyss.

“RIGHT! STAIRS TO THE RIGHT!” Amy yelled. She bolted towards the door and threw it open, with Caroline right behind her to slam the door shut. She saw the walls shifting once again as she did so, Deadberry and her freakish clones nowhere in sight.

“They’re gone,” she muttered to herself softly, collapsing on the floor in relief. “They’re gone, oh holy crap, they’re finally gone.”

Amy was at the top of the stairs at the next floor, breathing heavily and with her shotgun on the floor. “Why…why the hell…why the hell are those…those bitches…damn it.”

It took them both a few minutes to relax, to breath easily once again, to get over the rush of panic. And two seconds to realize who the other was.

“Jackpot,” Caroline said, as she suddenly and forcefully transformed into her hellhound form, fire blazing in all directions. Amy just barely escaped, leaving behind her shotgun and exiting out the door to the second floor. “COME ON OUT AMY!” she yelled, her voice magnified by her change. “YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME!”

Caroline, please, you need to calm down! There has to be a way—”

“THIS IS THE FUCKING WAY! IT’S THE ONLY FUCKING WAY, DON’T YOU GET IT?” she yelled. “WE ARE GOING TO KILL HER, AND WE ARE GOING TO CATCH HER AND WE WILL WIN!” Caroline ran up the steps and kicked open the door. “COME ON OUT, YOU STU—”

Amy stood her ground and pointed the fire extinguisher at Caroline, squeezing down the handle to spray out the flame-retardant powder. The flames that covered Caroline were put out, and Caroline was blinded by the sudden dust. She breathed some of it in, and began to choke, collapsing to the ground in a coughing fit, involuntarily transforming out of her hellhound form in the process.

“That worked…so much better…than I expected,” Amy admitted, walking over to the still-disorientated Caroline. “I’d say I’m sorry, but I don’t entirely feel like lying to you.”

Amy lifted up the quarter-full fire extinguisher, and slammed it down onto Caroline’s head.

She smiled as she did so.