#it will kill

😂 it's funny because i first saw FIF a YEAR AGO and thought 'huh, that was neat.' and never watched it again until like 1-2 weeks ago i was suddenly in the mood to watch it, so i downloaded a season and started watching that to see if i was actually interested in it or not and now suddenly i have 7+ seasons that i watch every night 😁

I am covered in blood. I am locked in the best public bathroom in Toronto. I am struggling to open the stupid fucking clamshell packaging on a luxury ceramic knife I stole. I can hear its claws clicking on the tile just outside.

Joke's on you, motherfucker. I've finally figured it out. I took my meds and now I'm the best I'm ever going to be. There's no one left but you and me.

It can't get in. I have time. There is a sacredness here that is inviolable, that never quite belongs to anyone. I'm seconds away from just slamming the fucking packaging on the sink or something when the sleepless adrenaline lumps kept yogically stable in my neck and upper spine unwind, whisper, "Respect the space." Even if the thing outside unspools me like a ball of twine, this place - the last 24/7 public washroom in the PATH, overlooked by the overlords - is a gift to future generations.

I breathe. I slip a fingernail in a factory defect, pull, lose the nail, and send the knife clattering to the tile. It's sharp and smooth and bright. I have your jacket in my cargos, Jetta; all this time, it's been dripping down my thigh.

Normal people can't see the thing. Normal people can't touch it. It doesn't care about normal bullets or bats or fire. It doesn't care if it kills you on the center divider on fucking Yonge, hefts your body up on its ripping claws and disembowels you in the middle of the street. The last few seconds of your life, writhing midair in the grip of an invisible freak, are posted on TikTok for all to see. But you saved me; I saw what you did with your teeth.

It feels it if it's you, any of us, or me.

I've got your battle jacket on the floor, bloody like the skin of a sacrificial animal. I slide the knife into a fold and it comes out so red it's nearly neon. I hear the tik-tik-tik of its claws on tile as it sweeps the backroom halls. Any hesitation and I'll puke up my pills. Right hand on the handle and the left one holding the knife. Proof of concept.

One swift motion, I open the door and there's the skinless red face and goggling eyes like biblically accurate Elmo, and the vast and clawing hands are moving and I'm faster, only just, my good arm like a speargun, and the knife bites clean and deep into the hairless cranium, and I hear it hiss back and I see its skull flapping like a second mouth, and I laugh and I stumble and I god damn fucking run.

It's early rush hour and the PATH is full of business casual, full of grandmas wielding their senior Shopper's discount, full of TTC cops solid and unmoving. No one gets in your way if you're covered in blood and laughing, not if what you've just stabbed isn't a person. I feel the atria and food courts slide by me more than I see them, I'm looking for a way to street level but the PATH doesn't work like that, I just want to get far enough away to see if the stabbing sticks.

But like the treble tone to the rush hour's bass, I hear it: tik-tik-tik.

I slow and listen but my blood's going hard in my ears. I try to make myself small but, even at the best of times, none of us could ever blend into the crowd. At least this fucking thing is so damn tall, so damn loud - but the winding underground tilemaze of the PATH is disorienting and unreal, I hear the thing coming from everywhere all at once, and if I stop moving or lash out they'll call security, they'll shut down all the good stations on the TTC. If I can get it again on the leg or some shit, I might be able to get up to the street. I crouch down in a crevice between budget clothes and cosmetic dentistry.

I see it, just a hint, red muscles and bloody meat and fucked-up toes like a person wanted to be a deer. I want to stab down, pin it to the floor, but my adrenaline redirects at the last second and I get it on the back of the knee. As I scramble four-legged between its legs and flee, I wonder if anyone else can hear the scream.

Still can't find a way out of the fucking PATH. It strikes me that, a few passages back, I bypassed a perfectly functional stairwell that had just been taped off; oops, thank you brain, what the fuck. I'm some distance away from Yonge and King, in the indefinite business zone where senior data analysts in good business slacks and Blue Jays jerseys transfer from office to SkyDome. Security's more severe around here, I know; I've gotten stopped before just looking like I don't belong. In a lower court, where the coffee isn't chain and the sushi's already closed up for the day, I see a guy in a Garda vest fix me with a stare and peel away from the porcine throng. I fall back on instincts, try to put on my best white-girl-in-trouble face, ready to ask if he knows the way to the hospital.

And then the fucking thing turns the corner, and it sights me, screeches, and runs.

I didn't even hear it, but now its uneven footfalls are louder than my screaming, louder than my pounding blood as I boot it somewhere, anywhere, away. I'm being chased by an invisible skinless monster and fucking private corporate security. I slash out without looking and thank fuck, because regardless of my opinions on private security there's an actual fucking monster in the room and all I can feel is just so damn glad that the blade didn't contact humanity.

I see four curved monster fingers arcing through the air and I'm still running. I hear a, "What the fuck?" And realize that the goons can actually see them. It should feel like more of a revelation than it is but I'm just so tired, I just keep running, I want this to be over, I want to mourn my friends, I want a fucking coffee, I want to be in my bed -

None of this is stopping until I make it end.

I stop stock-still in the white-tile intersection between who-knows-what and who-fucking-cares, listening. It's limping. It's hurt because I hurt it. There's no one around, a break from the crowds. Turns out a maniac running around with a knife downtown'll clear it out, who knew? There's a janitor cart and space to breathe and for a minute I'm back in the apartment, and we're just a pile of freaks some flavour of gay or trans or traumatized or all three. And it's you, Dragon, you're dyeing my hair, you're infodumping on me, you're saying, "There's a reason the spear is the most popular weapon throughout history."

Then I see your corpse cut open on the front walkway. Then I see the janitor cart, with the battered plastic pushbroom, with the electrical tape.

I'm good with junk and garbage. I'm good with rag rugs, shopping carts, milk crates. I'm good with electrical tape. I've got the knife taped on nice and solid by the time I hear it close, stumbling now: tik-tikTIK-tik. The knife is getting pale, now, losing its coating of blood, but I have an adequate supply. You got it all in my shirt, Dragon, when you died.

Then it turns the corner and, in the moment before it screams and rushes me, I note that I've never really had a good look at this guy. For the past three days it's all been scrabbling feet and broken fucking cars and the Robarts; it looks remarkably human, pinned as are we all beneath the equalizing force of energy-saver LEDs. It looks like a person stretched into monstrous shape; it looks precisely how I feel. Then I have my makeshift spear set for a charge like in fucking history class and it obligingly rushes me.

Center mass. The knife crunches into the wet red ribbon between exposed ribs like I planned it that way. I feel something pop, I pull the shaft to the side (ha), and the blade shears out of the monster's spine. I feel it spin wide, the spray of something not quite like blood spattering the tile. It must look so goddamn cool on the CCTV, and I realize, oh fuck, I have at best a few minutes before someone comes to arrest me.

I turn around. I must have popped a lung. Do monsters still need lungs? It's struggling to breathe.

Jetta, I goddamn loved you. The day we met was probably the most fun I've ever had in my life. Thank you for helping me figure myself out. You were everything I wanted to be.

Andi, I goddamn loved you. The world shouldn't have done what it did to you. You suffered everything this shitass world could throw at a person and you still planted flowers, and dreamed, and played. "Equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha."

Vick, I goddamn loved you. I've never known anyone so achingly fierce. I really did think you'd be the last of us, that you'd be here forever to take our memories into the future. You were better than anyone deserved.

Dragon, I goddamn loved you. You were so damn smart and it was a joy to watch you figure out how to use it right. None of this is your fault. None of us wanted this to happen.

It's looking up at me with what my subconscious believes is human eyes. I want to forgive it even now. I want to believe it's scared. So I put the blade right into those goggling orbs and I don't have to look at them anymore. I let the broom handle fall to the floor.

And I follow it down, before too long. As it twitches out its last coherent thoughts in front of me, I rise; I see myself from outside. I hope the CCTV can see it die. I imagine corporate security closing in on me with tasers and rubber bullets or whatever, with the real cops on the phone. I imagine, over everything, a textual scroll. Fin. Director. Starring roles.

I just want to go home.

*****

KILLER: The Haunt. Only I can see it. My friends could too, once. WEAPONS: Kitchen knife covered in my friends' blood. LOCATION: Downtown core at rush hour. HAZARDS: Terrified mob. LEVERAGE: The ritually warded public bathroom in the PATH, a safe room.

*****

So I cheated a little.

IT WILL KILL isn't really something you can make a character in. At best, you can set a couple parameters before you begin, but even that's kind of optional. The overriding design idea behind this game is to leap in without thinking, as quick as possible, and just get to rolling dice and building fiction as fast as you can. It's in medias res both in concept and execution - you're in the final scene of a horror movie, all your friends are dead, it's the last desperate confrontation, that's all you need to know, roll something, it's coming, do it now!

And I've lamented at my tendency with this challenge to write, like, a series of superhero backstories. Over and over, I write the beginnings of things, and every time I want to jump right into where the action is, then I remember that the dude I made is level 1 and probably can't 1v1 a skeleton army just yet. IT WILL KILL hits that splashdown narrative efficiency right where I want it. It's a storytelling space I wanted to play in. I deserve to do things just because I want to, right?

And what's funny is that I didn't intend to go into this writing the setting as being excessively Toronto but also, like, as I hammered away at my loose collection of faux rhymes, it was just what I settled back into. I've always found rush hour crowds to be panic-inducing, of course I'd set a final chase sequence there. I've always wanted to make a short liminal horror film in the PATH, the fucked-up backrooms death labyrinth we've got humming away underneath the downtown core that I always get lost in and never has an open bathroom and seems to get more hostile every time I go down there, so of course that's where my imagination naturally flowed. That's notable, at the least - more notable than I expected.

As for IT WILL KILL itself, I don't know if I have it in me to really critique the thing. As much as I could say about the dice math feeling a bit wibbly, it's still a PWYW indie solo/duet RPG with an incredibly simple scope and a compelling narrative premise that basically everyone knows how to direct. If not efficient or perfectly mathematically coherent, rolling dice in this game is fun, is a fresh system, and pushes the story forward every single time. You can get it for whatever change you have in your pocket right now and spend an evening forcing your partner to describe how they power-drill a psycho-killer straight through the mask. That's unassailable.

So, ultimately, while IT WILL KILL didn't hit the strict dictates of "making" a "character" that I set myself for this challenge, it hit every other optional goal and personal preference I have with this thing. I got to write something action-oriented, backstory-free, and with a defined conclusion. I get to highlight an indie game that I both genuinely enjoyed and genuinely find accessible (heck, most of DNGNCLUB's stuff seems to trend that way). I get to play through an entire solo RPG and write about it in a clear, complete, coherent fashion. I get to force non-Torontonians to know what the PATH is. Nailing all the extra credits questions still contributes to the final score. This was a good time.