Item 1 - Video!

[sneakykidwiththehair]

[Public]

[Video clicks on, and lo! It's a teenage boy with a shock of grey hair. He's walking as he talks, wandering the halls of the Barge apparently aimlessly.]

Uh, hey, I don't wanna cause a stink, but there's been some kind of terrible mistake here. My- uh, my parents, are going to be losing their minds back home in New Jersey...

[There might be something ever so slightly shifty about how he says this, but then again, he is a recently deceased teenage boy. He could easily just be nervous.]

All of this-- this inmate stuff? Yeah, you definitely got the wrong guy for that. I got a perfectly normal, crime free life, back home with my family. Yes, we cheat on our taxes and have the occasional three am family-document-shredding-party, but who doesn't? By nine am we're back to pancakes and oatmeal, and that, [decisive finger jab at the screen.] Is how you live the American dream, right?

[Private to Inmates]

So, does anyone ever actually escape from this place?

Comments

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

I don't believe you.

I don't believe I could have gone 60 bloody years without knowing whether something's real or not.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

But you're not real either, so how could you be expected to know?

We are not real. None of us. None of this.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

'Course I'm bloody real. I have a life. A whole fuckin' life that I remember, an' a death that I remember after it, too.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

And what did you do in your life that some hack in Hollywood couldn't have just made up? What'd you do in your afterlife that some kid with a typewriter in a studio couldn't have just cooked up?

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

Mate, my afterlife is too fuckin' weird to be made up.

Anyway. How do you know the guy with the Hollywood typewriter's life isn't the one that's made up?

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

You're way underestimating the sick imagination of mankind.

Look, I'm not saying your life isn't weird, Eerie was weird too, but that's fiction for you. Monsters, cults, the undead, all that weird stuff is what horror movies are made of.

It really never even occurred to you? You never even thought that your life was just too weird to be real?

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

My life wasn't weird. It was boring as fuck.

My afterlife's a bit of a different story. But who the fuck would want to watch people dying all the time? It's not interesting. An' it never changes, for forty fuckin' years.

Look, I own a television. I think people would start recognizing me as a movie star otherwise.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

So they wrote you a back story! If anything, nothing changing for forty years only supports the fact that they didn't bother to flesh your back story out! Someone just wrote: And Mason did drugs and killed people for forty years until the pilot episode!

And people don't notice in here, because none of them are real either. If you ever made it to the real world, everyone would call you something different, and they'd all think you were an actor.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

I do not fuckin' kill people, all right?

Fuck off. You don't know what the fuck you're on about.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

Fine, think what you want. There's no place like home, except here.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

I will. I will think what I like.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

Good. See if I care.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

One more thing: your hair makes you look like a pint-sized Mozart, you little twerp.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

Well you're like a dime store knock off of Hugh Laurie, starring in one of those public service announcements about how drugs are lame.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

I take high offense to that statement.

Extraordinarily high offense.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

Tell it to Chinese counterfeit Stephen Fry.

[Private to Mason alone!]

[maced_eggs]

Fuck off! Fuck off, you shite little punk!

[Private to Mason alone!]

[sneakykidwiththehair]

[NOISY CACKLING!!!]

[And then he fucks off.]