"...And what do you intend to fill the balloon with?"
"Just hydrogen and oxygen. Two to one ratio. Practically just water."The teacher sighs. "So you're trying to burn the building down." The teacher assumes that's how it will go, given they know that hydrogen mixed with air is highly flammable.
"No, of course not. I plan to pop it outside, and any fire the hydrogen causes should dissipate before it can even singe the grass. I can bring my own fire extinguisher if it will make you feel better."The teacher ran a hand down their face. She had to admit, it was better than letting the boy bring damaged lithium batteries, mercury, or potassium chlorate to school. "You promised that you wouldn't try to bring bombs to school anymore."
He did not, in fact, promise he wouldn't try to bring bombs to school. He promised not to use bombs as his science experiments anymore, though he wasn't about to correct her.
"It's not a bomb." At least, not in his opinion.
"It's just meant to make an extra loud pop. I've seen it done before." It shook the building it was in, but as long as no one stood too close it would be fine. Probably.
"You couldn't have just made a baking soda volcano?"
Damon shot her a disgusted look, because
really? How dare she? She just rolled her eyes in response.
"Fine, but if someone asks, you told me they would be water balloons."
Finally, he had an experiment locked in, and there wasn't much else to worry about for the day. Sometime during another teacher's rambling explanation for an assignment he had already finished while they were droning on, he checked the group chat, finding Erin going off about a website and a crazy demonstrator. Curious, he opened the site in an incognito tab on his phone out of habit, not because he thought it would actually hide his access to the site (barring one of his friends snooping through his internet history) but because it seemed vaguely suspicious, and incognito mode would automatically delete any tracking cookies the site put on his phone without getting buried in the sea of site login cookies he'd rather not have to reestablish.
The site was laid out like a forum, separating topics of discussion into different categories, with the most prominent among them being nested under either "Dream" or "Nightmare." Pressing and holding on a link to the former to open what would likely be the first of many tabs, he began skimming through some of the posts to confirm what Erin had said about the site before going back and skimming through the very interesting nightmare section. It was creative enough that he might drop by from time to time to read what these people have cooked up - creepypastas were always a fun read, though it seemed to be part of an over-arching meta-narrative that he wasn't really grasping. Scrolling to the absolute top and bottom of the site, he couldn't find any tiny links to the site owner; just a standard search feature, and it didn't seem to have any filters that would make it easy to narrow down posts made by mods. None of the categories had pinned threads of any kind, and if the site had any rules, it didn't seem like they were forthcoming about them.
Having gotten a measure of what the site was like, he began trying to get to the bottom of what the site was, in earnest. The site had an introductory section, though it was more for people than the site itself, and while it was intriguing to read about this person or that person trying out some ghost story they heard of for the first time, each one had a slight personal twist to it, and each one claimed to have experienced some wacky lucid adventure in their dreams. Okay, so it's a dream journal site, all well and good until he read about someone keeping a curse laid on him while he had been dreaming, warning other people off and lamenting the way the curse ruined their life.
So, maybe this
is a creepypasta site? Going back to the nightmares section, he began reading through them in earnest, and found similar stories talking about apparent permanent disfigurement (pictures weren't included) or even having someone they were dreaming with die in a dream and never wake up. Going through post after post, before he knew it, class was over, and he had to get to the next one.
During the next class, and the next, his thoughts kept drifting back to the site, and he soon found himself surreptitiously looking through it on his phone. A thought occurred to him: Surely there were internet trolls? People who didn't play along? A quick search of the site with common keywords found a number of posts by a number of users, though plenty of them were promptly banned for being generally unpleasant or even whipping out some slurs. Still, all of them simply had a label underneath them - [USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST], and the site admin or moderators never made an obvious appearance. Most users didn't even bother engaging with them, even if they weren't particularly combative. The ones that weren't banned or ignored typically had their threads closed for being off-topic, again, only having a label at the bottom telling people why the thread was locked. Most of those were simply expressing confusion about the site, though the techniques section of the site had a number of similar threads get straightforward responses on how to access said dreamworld, with predictable responses about becoming a believer right after trying it out.
Another search and seven tabs later, he found one where the confused original poster mocked the posters who responded to them. Despite not being locked, the thread unceremoniously ends there. Clicking on their profile, he could see that they had made other posts, and found that their most recent one was about how much they loved flying dreams, and if anyone had any tips to invoke more of them. Scrolling through their posting history, he found that there was no heel-face turn in between their confused post and their first dream post. That, perhaps, was the most suspicious thing about the entire site. Thousands of people could keep a joke or narrative going with no prior coordination - a certain reddit post came to mind where a child is told in the responses that it is indeed true that Fortnite stops working at night, with claims to the contrary downvoted until hidden, at least for a while. However, if this was all an elaborate meta-narrative, it seems odd that this one random poster would behave like an actual person does, refusing to admit they were wrong on the internet. It doesn't serve the narrative, and even if he was paranoid enough to consider the idea that it's a deliberate ploy to sell the act, that seems a bit too subtle for an impromptu collaborative effort.
If they were playing a character, it didn't make sense for them to do a complete 180; narratively, you would expect them to either double down or accept it begrudgingly, not pretend they weren't proven wrong. Hrmmm...
He made an account for the site - still in incognito mode, with "throwawayaccount" as his password, an email verification through a temporary email, and a pseudo-gibberish username based on the temporary email, then made a very simple post responding to someone else's introduction thread.
Nice to meet you.
He hit post, and... yep, there was no post delete button. None on the post, none in his account settings, none anywhere in his posting history.
He narrowed his eyes behind his glasses.
He went back to the search bar to look for people who wouldn't admit they were wrong, because it was eerily realistic of them. Besides that one user, he found someone who wouldn't admit it in the same thread, but did a few posts later when someone called them out on it, which just didn't happen at all with the other user. Most others didn't make any post after their first thread. Hrmmm...
As the bell to his last class rang, he tossed a message into the groupchat, properly responding to Erin.
They have some decent creepypasta in their nightmare section
If we're trying this out, would you like to draw some satanic ritual circles while we're at it?
It took him a bit to dig up the funny (and obviously fake) satanic ritual sigil infographic he had seen before, but even if he were to suspend his disbelief about the site and take it all at face value, that called into question whether every other kind of mysticism was real, so it was the kind of joke about the situation that didn't necessarily express overt skepticism.
Occam's razor was still pointing towards the site being a bunch of crazy people, with shared mass hallucinations being more plausible than a parallel dream world, much less multiples of which that could be visited only through dreams, or dreams that have any lasting physical ramifications, or all of it being correlated with any of the techniques on the forum. A quick search of the site for mention of drugs only pulls up a lot of the same trolls and naysaying posts from before.
It was perplexing. He tried approaching the unbelievable nature of the site from multiple angles, googling different web traffic checkers and putting the site in. It wasn't the most frequented site by any means, but supposedly it was visited by people from a number of places, mostly English-speaking given that the site only appeared to operate in one language. Someone could have always spoofed their location with a VPN or whatever, but while the daily traffic to the site was low, it's been seen by over a thousand people, and unless they...
He went back to the site and tried to find some way of measuring how many unique users the site had. Ultimately he failed to find any convenient count, and just began brute forcing it with a notepad app splitting up his phone screen, writing down usernames in shorthand and using the find and replace function on the app any time he was unsure. By the time he arrived at the meeting area, he realized he had missed a message in the group chat telling everyone to meet by the coffee booth. On the way there, he reached a tally of 40 unique users that had all posted within the last month. There were more sections of the forum to go through, and there were likely much more if you included older posts, but it was starting to approach the range where a single person or group of people orchestrating all of this would be implausible. He eventually stopped counting and began digging through the individual users to try to determine if they were real. For some of them, he could believe an AI wrote their every post. For others, they had very clear posting habits - lots of short posts as if they were having a verbal conversation, others with longer, more infrequent posts, posters who exclusively posted their own threads about their dream adventures, and posters who exclusively commented on the threads of others. He even found one of those "Um ackchyually" people who exclusively posted random information when it was relevant to the posts of other people, with their threads tending to be about statistical likelihoods of different techniques.
...Is this what he sounds like online...?
The thought that he might come off as annoying clouded his thoughts until he arrived at the coffee place, his ruminations once more being derailed as he moved on to internally debating whether he should have multiple cups of coffee today.
