Sell me on the Fears

The Plague Doctor spreads sickness and death yes but encounters have also been known to turn people into hypochondriacs. Another reason that he might leave you alive . . . two words - Typhoid Mary. Why kill you when you can be asymptomatic and still spread death to those close to you?

The person to fit the bill of a Typhoid Mary should be a very social person, in contact with lots of people daily. Other characters that are antisocial by nature should die fast in a series. At least, that's how I would set it up.

I am seriously going to try my hand at this.

You wanna know what makes EAT scary? Well, EAT is one of the most complex things I have ever created in my life, and I still don't fully understand her. It is the fear of water and drowning in your obsessions, and on a much larger scale, it is the fear of eldritch complexity and of the end of evolution.

Small-scale, Jordan Eats Normally Now and my three creepypastas covered it really well, I'd say. EAT's this vague thing that the reader is never sure as to the precise identity of. "Is it EAT? Is it Salmacis? Is it the Hogweed? Is it The Camper? Is it this thing here, is it that?" You can never be sure, but as the story goes on, you start to realize that EAT is all of these. EAT can be all of these things because EAT is an evolutionary marvel; EAT has survived to the point of impossibility.

Jordan, the protagonist of Jordan Eats, starts the blog off looking into people who suddenly begin obsessing over strange things before not only disappearing, but their blogs' disappearance, as well. The only true link is a commenter known as "The Camper." Jordan gets interested in this, but he doesn't just get interested, he gets obsessed. He gets so obsessed that he essentially gets his brother killed. He can't live with the grief anymore, so he does the same to himself. That's pretty much that.

On the larger scale, I once wrote a small passage about EAT's terror.

Quote :

Picture the human eye. The human eye is the world's greatest camera. And it didn't just appear as it was. It evolved over thousands, millions of years. It crafted itself, getting rid of flukes, and ultimately becoming this marvel it is today. The human eye is one example of how absolutely perfect evolution is.

But at the same time.. there is no universal standard for "perfect" evolution. The human eye became the way it is after millions of years, but it's far from perfect. Hell, the human body is still missing some key parts. There are still senses out there we have no way of.. well, sensing! And the only way to sense these things would be to wait another million years for humanity to maybe develop a way to sense them.

But what if there was a creature that is evolution? A creature that has the end result of all evolutionary paths? It has the literal perfect mind, the literal perfect senses, the literal perfect body. And it wants to share this with the universe. It wants everyone to be perfect. But it doesn't think we're even close enough to deserve being part of its perfection. So it tests us.

Those who aren't fit to evolve just rot away, no chance of a life. Those who are are tested in its own self-contained natural selection path. And if you reach the end of this, you share its perfection. You see the end of evolution. The point to life. You become the point to life. And you continue looking for more creatures to welcome into the hive. They can't outrun you. They're imperfect, and you are perfect. By universal standards. You are Planck perfection. The most eldritch of measurement scales.

That is why EAT is terrifying to me, because we're supposed to not know all the secrets to life yet. Evolution is sort of life's way of slowly easing a species up to being fit to see the secrets. And at the same time, evolution is its secrets. Yet here's EAT, forcing everything into you, to the point where you become nothing and it eats you. You know all of life's secrets, but you haven't evolved to the point where you can, so you perish, and all you were becomes part of EAT's stream of thought. Yet you don't even perish. It all makes perfectly logical and scientifically plausible sense.

I thought EAT out too well.

Any more Fears you want me to try to explain? I can tackle any of them. :3

Here's one for the Archangel:

"Suicide Is Painless"

The television in the rec room was playing an old episode of M*A*S*H. Kevin listened as the voices from the TV sang how the game of life is hard to play and how we're gonna lose it anyway. M*A*S*H was one of those shows that they were allowed to watch at Ashford. They weren't allowed to watch the news - the doctors said that would be too upsetting. But an old show about the Korean War, where the theme song told people how delightful killing yourself was, no, that wasn't upsetting at all.

Kevin once asked Doctor Morgan about that and the good doctor had explained how the program looked and sounded old, so the residents knew that it wasn't really happening now. And because it wasn't happening now, it couldn't affect them, couldn't hurt them. The news had current events, events that could affect them. "And the theme song?" Kevin asked.

"They don't really listen to the lyrics," Doctor Morgan said. "They just like looking at the pictures. I think you're the only one here who actually knows what the song is about."

"And you aren't worried about me?"

"Not at all," Doctor Morgan placed one hand on Kevin's shoulder. "I'm proud of you, Kevin. I'm proud of all that you've accomplished."

Technically, the doctors weren't supposed to touch the patients, but Kevin didn't mind. He liked Doctor Morgan. Doctor Morgan was his psychiatrist a few years ago and Kevin had told him all about what happened: about the hallucinations, about his family and how they died, about how he kept seeing them even after they were cremated. That's why he was at Ashford. He had voluntarily checked himself in.

And then one day Doctor Morgan had stopped being his psychiatrist. No one told him why. All they said was that Doctor Morgan had gone away and he would be getting a new psychiatrist. They even gave him some medication to help, but he didn't like it. It make him sick.

So he was so happy when Doctor Morgan returned. Doctor Morgan said that technically he wasn't Kevin's psychiatrist, but he still advised Kevin on stuff. Like on how to fake taking his medication. Like on how to pick locks. Like what to do when the guards were distracted. "I was trying to help you, Kevin," he said, "but they wouldn't let me. Once they're out of the way, I can start helping you again."

So Kevin did what Doctor Morgan asked and cut the other doctors' throats and watched as they bled out on the floor. It reminded him of the day his family died, the feeling of the razor in his hand, but back then it was his grandmother (dead of a heart attack three years ago) who was telling him how everything would be okay, how they were only hallucinations, they weren't his real family at all.

Kevin walked back to the rec room and sat down in front of the television. Another episode of M*A*S*H came on. The theme song started playing. Kevin held onto a pair of scissors and really listened to the lyrics.

suicide is painless
it brings on many changes
and I can take or leave it if I please

Another angle for the Wooden Girl, one I've gotten a bit of mileage from in To Light a Candle, is the paranoia that anyone you meet could be a Puppet. Your kind old neighbor, that bum on the street corner, your girlfriend, that Salvation Army bellringer, everyone who works in your office. At any moment their limbs could jerk, they could start moving with marionette motion and they could try to kill you at Her bidding. For extra horror they might be crying and screaming and begging you to stop them the whole time they're trying to kill you.