A Bet To Lose, Chapter 28 free porn video

Leslie had set her alarm early in the morning but woke up before it. She was determined to go without, that Thursday in early August, go without her wheelchair around the house, dress herself like a normal person, go to the bathroom like a normal person, eschew all of the assistive devices. She knew she wasn't going to be completely normal, normal teenagers didn't stagger around like a grandmother with osteoporosis and an artificial hip, but she was going to try to at least be functional. Right. She could do this. Normally, she would slide butt- first from her carefully sized bed and onto her waiting wheelchair, from where she would begin her day. Even that had started to become tricky, before the treatment. She was glad she hadn't worn the pajamas that her friends had given her - she didn't think she could take those off without help yet. Her light silk nightshirt came off easily, and grabbing her phone in one hand and leaning against the bed, she carefully put one foot down, then the other. Right. She could do this. Leaning on the furniture and taking careful, shuffling steps, she slowly opened each of the drawers to pull out her clothes, and then she'd sat down on the floor to dress herself, hitting the ground with a soft thump. She managed to put on her pink shirt without sitting up all the way - anything resembling a situp was still painful to try - she used her legs to wiggle on the panties (Susie had helped her pick those out) and pink shorts, putting the phone in her pocket and then carefully putting on each of her socks and Velcroing her shoes. She'd had them a while but was just beginning to break them in, actually walking for the first time in what felt like ages. Right, now to get off the ground, a thing she really couldn't do without using something else. She had seen the 'I've fallen and I can't get back up' thing as part of a meme compilation, and she felt like she finally understood it. She managed to crawl to her wheelchair, and with slow, laborious movements, inched herself up on it, trying not to scrape herself against the metal. She managed to turn around, sitting on her wheelchair as if she were going to use it. She put her feet down, trying to stand up off of it - And she couldn't. She wound up pushing herself backwards, right where she'd started. It was achingly close, but she fell back down onto the wheelchair, her body and legs unable to get her from sitting to standing. She'd wanted to be off her wheelchair that day, and instead she'd wound up sitting exactly where she didn't want to be. Nearly crying in frustration, she woke up her parents. "Leslie, are you all right?" her mother shouted. "I'm fine," Leslie replied in a very not-fine voice. At least she'd gotten that back. She didn't sound like a cripple anymore. Mom walked in and was surprised to see her fully dressed. 'Leslie needs help dressing herself' had been a fact of life ever since they'd adopted her. For a moment she'd thought that Leslie had gone to sleep with her clothes on, but that couldn't be right. "Please stand me up, Mom," Leslie begged. "I can do everything else, just not that." "Oh, sweetheart, I've got you," her mother said, helping pull her daughter to her feet and embracing her in a deep hug. "Just a few more weeks, Leslie," her father told her. "You don't need to risk yourself like this." "I just wanted to be normal for one morning..." Leslie replied, only then realizing that there were tears in her eyes. "I want to walk to the bathroom, brush my teeth, brush my hair, take a pee..." "We don't want you to hurt yourself before your therapy today," Mom told her gently. "How about if I walk with you? Lean on me as much as you need to." Leslie wanted to tell her that she didn't need her help, that it would be fine, but it was too obviously a lie. "Thanks, Mom..." she said, trying to walk with as little support as possible as her mother put an arm around her shoulder, helping her into the bathroom. Leslie leaned against the sink, putting some of her weight on her abdomen as she washed her face and hands, then brushing her teeth and finally her hair. She was in an awkward position, and her mother was there, but she was doing it herself, and she wasn't in a wheelchair. She knew that her father was right, that she only had a few more weeks of this kind of thing the way things were going, but she wanted to put it behind her immediately and permanently. She was just so sick of it. She wanted to play princesses with her friends. She wanted to be the caregiver for a change. She wished she were the Incredible Hulk and could put on muscle just by getting mad. But instead, she was sitting on a toilet that she couldn't stand up from by herself. Her mother helped her up, and she stumbled and struggled to the breakfast table, one step at a time, her hand against the wall, her mother watching her but not holding her, managing to sit down by herself on a real chair. She looked down at the ramp. Last year, her father had engaged in his own little carpentry project, installing a wheelchair ramp next to the dining table so that they could simply push her up to it rather than have to take her out. Her parents were doing so much for her, and what did she do? She woke them up early and worried them, just because she wanted to try to be normal too early. "I'm sorry," she started. "I shouldn't have..." "Are you feeling the wrong kind of hurt?" Dad interrupted her with as he cooked homemade hash browns and ham together, having decided that it was a good day for an early start anyway. The potato slicer had been one of the best investments he'd ever made. "No," Leslie said. She knew the difference between the moderate ache of muscle use and the pointed agony of muscle destruction. "Then it's okay," her father said, very gently. "But this is a good place to stop for the morning." "There's something else we want to discuss today," her mother said gently, and Leslie recognized the tone. This was Mom's serious voice, the same tone of voice that she'd used to discover that Leslie had been suffering from roid rage way back when. "We know that you're having a wonderful time with your friends, and we don't want to accuse them of doing anything intentionally, but we're worried that you might be feeling pressured into doing things that you don't want to do, or letting things be done to you that you're not comfortable with." There had been certain tells, in their occasional breakfasts together. Richard and Zoe were guarded around their mother, but when it was just Robert and Willa with the group, they tended to relax their guard somewhat, and the adults noticed certain subtleties of behavior, the way Richard in particular deferred to Susie, the way that they would semi-conspiciously not tell the adults about their daily activities, in a semi-joking 'that's really private stuff' way, between all five of them. Leslie laughed in reply. "No, Mom, you don't get it... they don't... we don't do anything to each other that the other person doesn't want done to them." Leslie laughed and shook her head in that same semi- conspicuous 'You have to know what this involves, I'm not giving you details about this' way. "Whatever this is, have they done it to you?" Mom asked seriously. "No, Mom, they can't do it to me, and I don't want them to, because-" Leslie suddenly realized that she'd given a lot away with just that, and suddenly put her face in her hands. Why could she never just not tell her parents things? She felt obligated to continue before they got the really wrong idea and her friend-filled summer was sharply curtailed. "They take turns being helpless. Well, not really take turns, but they've all done it, it's not like some horrible thing they're doing to each other. Zoe even asked for it when I was in the hospital, she said it helped her relax." Leslie's face was red with embarrassment. "Please, please don't tell them I told you about this stuff..." "Are they doing it safely?" Robert asked as he served the food, and for a moment Leslie saw a sharp similarity between her father and Richard. "Yeah, they can actually just get out any time." Leslie felt obligated to immediately change the subject, and she suddenly realized why her parents might be worried. "Did you see something?" This was a sort of code phrase. Leslie's parents wouldn't tell her about what they did unless she really wanted to know, and the question had been gradually shortened with how many times she asked it. Sometimes, they would come home angry or even crying, and one time, Robert had, wordlessly, picked her up out of her chair and hugged her. That was the first time she'd asked him if he'd seen something at work, and his answer was that yes, he had. He had never, ever told her what that one was in detail - it involved sexual abuse - although he and her mother had, when asked, told her about other cases, without giving too much away. Sometimes it was scary to hear about, but it was nice to know that she wasn't the only one who had been hurt, that her parents intervened in the bad things. "Somebody had bought a used laptop and ran an undelete program as soon as he bought it. I think he was looking for cryptocurrency, but instead, he found a bunch of emails." He took a bite of his hash browns, trying to figure out how or if to even tell her about this. "Apparently, some members of a certain fetish group had gone off to their convention and decided, God only knows why, to send a babysitter, just a couple years older than you, to bring their ten-year-old kids into the fetish." He took a bite of the ham, buying time to decide what else to tell her, but he nearly choked when she asked: "Is this the one where the girl scared her out with a shotgun?" The atmosphere in the room changed instantly. Both her parents carefully chewed their food, staring at her. "Susie told us," she answered before they could ask the obvious. "She said it was a rumor she heard." Her parents looked at each other. "This was way back in May!" "That's about when it happened," Dad said, putting his fingers to his temples, suddenly feeling much older. "This has all the makings of a huge mess." The most bizarre thing to ever hit his inbox, and his daughter already knew about it. "Let's just calm down for a moment," Mom said. "Leslie, you're not in trouble, your friends aren't in trouble. But if there's anything else you know about this, just tell us, please." "One time... this was right after Richard met you, with her mom. We went over to Spectral, where we bought Ricky's rainbow dress, and Susie actually asked Franklin, the owner, about the rumor. There was some group that disbanded right after it happened, so he said it was probably real." It had been a memorably weird conversation. "That's what most of the emails were about," Robert told her. There were actually a lot of emails that had things like 'Call me' - the laptop's owner was trying to avoid leaving a paper trail - and he was sure that some others had been deleted irrevocably. "You ever hear of the, uh, 'Greater Area Sissies'?" "Yeah, that was the name. I remember, he said some of them wouldn't even talk to each other anymore." "As you'd expect," Dad said. "That group got spooked, one of them even said it was like they found their names on the Epstein flight logs." "The other thing was, he said that if this gets out, it'd splash back on Franklin and Richard." Leslie realized that she hadn't been touching her food and started to eat. "It'd get on the kids, too," Mom added, sighing. She was the one who had typed up the reply to the laptop's new owner, using official language to practically beg him not to tell anyone else because of the risk it posed to the children involved; fortunately, he'd agreed, and she'd even gotten the strong impression that he'd deleted everything on his end because he didn't want to be part of this any more than the group members had. She didn't want to tell Leslie about any of this, almost said that this was a poor choice of topic for the breakfast table, but her daughter already knew more than enough. "What we think happened is that a few adults made a number of very bad decisions, and I still can't imagine what they were thinking. They would have done worse, I think, if their group hadn't intervened. And what we're worried about is whether our intervention would do more harm than good." "It's like this," Dad started. "Let's just get this out of the way first, I'm sure you want to know the details if you don't already." Leslie nodded. "The parents' friends sent their teenage daughter over to quote-unquote babysit with several bondage items in a suitcase. Mitten restraints, shoes they couldn't walk in with spikes and some kind of clever spring system, some sort of dress hobble, that kind of thing." Leslie recoiled in shock. "Yes. For a ten year old. We are dealing with some very, very degenerate people here." Abuse-wise, this wasn't the worst incident Robert had seen, not by a long shot; he'd seen a child maimed, actually maimed, for interrupting his parents' TV time. This was simply disturbing. He would have been even more disturbed if he knew exactly why Leslie was recoiling. Bondage mittens and hobble dresses were available on Etsy - she knew that, she'd been looking over Susie's shoulder - but the springy-spike booties weren't available anywhere, at least not anymore. Those had come from only one source, and Leslie was very sure that Susie had gotten them from the very same source that the crazy teenager had. She'd cultivated an inner voice over the past few months, 'What would Richard and Susie do?', which she occasionally invoked when she was worried that things would go badly. That inner voice was screaming at her to shut the fuck up and give nothing else away to her parents about any of this. She took a large bite of food so she'd have a reason not to use her mouth to talk. "I'm sorry, that was probably too much," Dad said, misinterpreting why she clearly didn't want to talk about it. "I'll stop here, but we would like to talk to Susie about this, just to find out what she knows." Leslie was having the same thoughts for different reasons. "Don't let this affect your therapy, Leslie. This has nothing to do with you, and it doesn't actually have anything to do with your friends, regardless of what shenanigans you get up to. We just want some information, and then we'll decide where to go with this from here," Willa said calmly. But it did have something to do with her friends, and once the meal was over, Leslie carefully walked back to her room with her mother's support, frantically typing in the chat that her parents wanted to talk to them and that they were to mention nothing at all to them about bondage gear. That was a question Leslie wanted answered, privately, and the chat was silent for a few minutes before Susie promised that she would tell everyone everything after Leslie's parents were done talking to them. The rest of the morning was largely usual. The group met as they did every morning for Leslie's therapy. The Team Leslie uniforms were actually starting to fade; regular wearing and washing was gradually bleeding out what was once a sharp pink into something more muted. Leslie loved it, and she waved off Susie's suggestion of replacing them. She wanted the uniforms to keep fading. It was actually perfect. By the time they were totally used up, her friends would have no reason to wear them anymore. "Right now, this has priority. Let's focus on this, and we can worry about anything else later," her father reminded her, and Leslie tried her level best to take that advice. Her numbers continued moving in the right direction. And then it was time for them to go to Susie's house - the group wasn't really comfortable meeting anywhere else - for a planned, awkward conversation. "Let's start with this," Robert said as they sat down, Zoe helping Leslie onto a chair. "I need to ask you something. I'm not going to ask you the details, don't even tell me the details. I just need to know this. Is everything you're doing with each other safe, sane, and consensual?" "I guarantee you that everything we're doing is safe and consensual," Caroline said, smiling and nodding and getting some giggles in reply. "Sane?" She wiggled her hand in equivocation. "Eh. Depends who you ask. But we've been doing it, and look at us." Leslie's parents got her point: they were all still fine. Willa chuckled, an intentional, easy chuckle to show that they were all on the same team, all on the same page. She'd considered asking to talk to Susie privately but that would turn the situation adversarial, which was bad when you were trying to get information out of teenagers, as she very well knew from long, long experience. "All right. You know what we're really here to talk about. Susie, when you first heard about that incident, was it enough to make you consider calling us, or somebody?" "I thought somebody already had!" Susie replied. "Even Franklin said their whole group broke up. The thing I heard in a chat room was that some kid got put into some bondage dress thing by his babysitter and his twin sister threatened her with a shotgun to make her leave. I seriously don't know any more than you do about this." This was somewhat true but entirely misleading. She actually didn't know more than they did, with their pile of emails. She just knew a lot more than they thought she did. Robert and Willa looked at each other and decided not to pursue it. They were sure she was hiding things but decided that seriously interrogating her would have been a bad move, figuring that she, like a lot of other people, simply didn't want to get involved. "Well, nobody did, apparently, but we think they've stopped," Willa said. "Or been stopped, rather. We've seen it sometimes, in extended families, where the rest of the family intervenes to stop abuse before something awful happens, and we think that this time, their group played that role. Which makes us wonder, and this is the important question, are those children still at risk? That's what we're actually trying to find out, Susie. We don't care if you learned a lot about this and decided not to talk for whatever reason. We're trying to figure out if it's even a good idea to remind those kids about this and make them worry that they might get taken away." Caroline was startled. "You're not going to take them away? After that?" "First off, it isn't in our jurisdiction," Robert said. "It's in the Greater Area, but it's the next county over. If we start the process, then, well, you ever heard the phrase 'the process is the punishment'?" None of them had. "Something like this? There'd be a widespread investigation, anybody mentioned in the emails could be targeted. The news media might get involved, God forfend. A lot of more-or-less innocent people would get caught up in this, and I have no idea what the prosecutor would do, it'd be an absolute shitshow either way. But the most important part is always the children. There's four of them, the ten-year-olds, then a six-year-old boy and a two-year-old girl." "A goddamn six year old, a two year old?!" Caroline shouted. "If the younger kids were involved, how much they were involved, we don't know," Robert said calmly, used to being shouted at. He really wanted a hold of the email accounts of the directly involved parents or perhaps Priscilla, the group's leader. Those people had had many unkind words, but the emails he'd been reading had only referred to them, not quoted them. "But what we do know is that if the investigation does get started, all four of those kids could easily get taken out of their upper-middle-class home and put into the foster system in the middle of a pandemic. What do you think that's going to do to them?" Caroline was amazed that Robert was talking this way, although she somewhat saw his point. She considered how to respond when Richard jumped in: "So that's what you need me for?" All eyes turned to him. "The process is the punishment, right? If this was just a one-time thing that ended like it should have, if you sic the system on them, you might cost some kids their home for nothing. But you're part of the system, you can't find out without starting the process. I'm not part of the system, I'm some random hacker." Richard smiled, remembering how Robert had decided to tank for him, as his mother had said. It was time to flip that around. "You didn't get those emails, I did. You're not the one who's going to find out if they're still doing this, I am. And if they're not, you never knew about it." The looks he was getting were a mix of incredulity, pursed-lips 'oh boy, here we go', and smiling support. Susie was one of the ones smiling at him, and that was all that mattered. Willa and Robert glanced at each other for a moment. "If you were anyone else..." Robert started, shaking his head a bit and quietly chuckling. He had considered doing this himself, but if he were identified in something like this outside his jurisdiction, he could be in trouble no matter what he did. But Richard, who was he? A 13-year-old who got his hands on some information and decided to do something with it? He wasn't a mandatory reporter, he wasn't a mandatory anything. 'Let's prosecute this schoolkid for asking around' was highly unlikely, and there was plenty of plausible deniability even if his connection was discovered, which was very doubtful. Willa exhaled. Was she really going to go along with this? She didn't see any good alternatives. "As long as you don't make this a bigger problem than it has to be," she said. "Don't compound the situation. If you want to do this, and you can find out the right things safely, then I suppose we should let you do it. I'm fairly certain that we're the only ones who have copies of this information right now. I'll send it to you, but, well, you already know not to spread it to anyone. Even if those children are still being abused, in which case we'll get the local authorities involved immediately." Richard nodded. His general instinct in these scenarios was to blow the lid: to tell everyone everything, to create a big a boom as possible. But Franklin had been right: he could be within the blast radius if he did that. "We've got to get going, we'll send it all to you when we get to work," Robert said. "Seriously, be careful. Just find out the minimum and then you're done. And for God's sake, don't do anything to them yourself, no matter what." Robert had a vision of what might happen if they were still abusing the kids. If Richard caught them in the act, he might want to take things into his own hands. "I won't," Richard promised. "Thank you," Willa said. "But this isn't something we want you doing again, we're not going to turn this into a regular thing. Once is more than enough." Richard just nodded in reply, and the adults bid their goodbyes and left, hugging their daughter, feeling confident that they were leaving her in good hands. The girls were very grateful to him for stepping in. It made the mood brighter, made the upcoming conversation less harsh. It was still another conversation that had to happen, but it was under the shroud of 'And now Ricky's going to do something about all this'. "Are you ready to tell us where you got the stuff?" Zoe asked. Susie breathed in, breathed out. She hated this kind of thing, but who ever liked it? "You remember the guy who came to my door to drop it off? The scared guy? He was a friend of the family, the ones with the babysitter, they were the ones who made that stuff. He was the one who told me the rumor in the first place. He told me that they were all running scared, they were trying to get rid of everything as fast as possible, I actually got it really cheap. They'd quit, they surrendered, they were going out of business. I didn't want to tell you guys because I figured it'd ruin the fun. I'm sorry. I didn't think it'd actually matter, and I didn't have any way of knowing where they lived, I didn't even know how far the guy had to drive to get here." "You know what this is like?" Caroline asked rhetorically. "It's like finding out that your prescription drugs come from a company that used to work for the Nazis." The topic had come up in a class last school year. "Bad people didn't profit off you buying that stuff, did they?" "There's no way they profited," Susie said. "So, are any of you going to freak out at her over this? I'm not," Caroline said. Richard just shook his head. Susie had been worried the most about his reaction, because this was the kind of thing that pissed him off, but he didn't care whether her actions were technically ethical or not. Susie hadn't been doing anything that led, even indirectly, to anyone getting abused or anything that would trip his triggers. Moreover, this was Susie, and he could never, ever get mad at her. For him, there wasn't any drama; this part of the conversation wasn't even relevant, other than that it was making Susie uncomfortable, and he put his arm around her in silent protectiveness. "I wish you would have told me, but you're right, it was never supposed to matter," Leslie agreed. "Great stuff made by horrible people," Zoe summed it up as. "Anyway, Ricky, what sly hacker devil sorcery are you going to do to find out about the kids?" Zoe figured that he might find out their schedules, single out the kids, ask the family members separately under different usernames, eat around the edges and gradually chew them up. "Don't need to," Richard replied. His plan was infinitely simpler and bolder, and it took very little convincing to get agreement for it. The doorbell very rarely rang, and almost never unexpectedly. Walter immediately went to answer it; the kids weren't expected to, not anymore, and he wouldn't want them to anyway. At least things were stable; he and his wife were both working from home, but they still had jobs. Still had a family, such as it was. Nobody was breaking anything, nobody had hurt anyone any more than they already had. He peered through the peephole and saw a boy wearing a rainbow shirt and short set, colorful sneakers on his feet, and something about that, even about the way he stood at the door, disturbed him deeply. Who the hell was this kid? He opened the door slowly, looking Richard in the face, just then noticing the kid's physique. "Can I help you?" "Hey, Walter. The booties with the springy spikes really are rare, aren't they?" In all his studies of social engineering and hacking, Richard had never imagined that he'd actually see a human being bluescreen, the error messages practically visible on the man's face. "You're probably going to want to let me in," he suggested with a slight smile. He'd learned this from Starcraft rather than any hacker manual: Press the advantage, keep him off balance, keep him on the back foot. Speaking of games, were the older kids in the middle of playing something on the big screen in the living room? He'd heard the six-year-old running around a sprinkler in the backyard. These were very good signs, and Richard got the sudden impression that he was beating a dead horse. "A whole bunch of people know exactly where I am right now," he said anyway, just in case Walter got any very bad ideas. "Listen," Walter said quickly and very quietly so his children wouldn't hear, opening the door more widely and not resisting when Richard stepped through it. "I can't give you as much as you probably want for this, but it'll take me a little while to liquidate the assets. If you have a little bit of patience, we can negotiate." Richard actually needed a second to process that. "You think I'm here to blackmail you? I don't need your money, I have limitless money." He said it with confidence, and it helped that it was mostly true. "I'm not actually here for you, technically," he said, glancing at the screen, the kids still oblivious to what was behind them, and he was about to ask the kids the most basic of questions before he noticed movement upstairs. Jodi looked about fifteen years older than her true age, her hair gray from stress and bags growing under her eyes. She'd gained weight since that fateful day, that day that she couldn't stop from replaying in her mind over and over again, that day that had come to redefine her life. She'd managed to secure prescriptions for Xanax and a cocktail of SSRIs, stopping the anxiety and depression from hitting too hard, most of her emotions wrapped in cotton. The combination made her vulnerable to other thoughts, occasional surges of largely harmless irrationality, but when she looked down the stairs at the kid in the rainbow clothes, and his eyes met hers, she read his unmistakable body language and his mere presence struck her like a blow. She didn't need to ask who he was; she knew exactly what he was, what he was there for, what he had learned. She didn't see a boy in that moment. She saw a demon. Her eyes went wide and she immediately retreated the way she came, slamming the door behind her. Richard had imagined that meeting, playing it out in his head, imagining what he'd need to say to crush her, destroy her, make sure that she was stopped for good, not imagining that she was already crushed and that he wouldn't even need to say anything at all. There was no point in pursuing; it would be like bombing rubble. "If you want to talk to her," Walter started. "I don't want to talk to her, I want to talk to them," Richard said, louder this time, casually walking around the couch to where Thomas and Tamara were still engrossed in Diablo 3 (their characters were very high level and they had gotten very good), noticing what they were wearing: matching dresses in different shades of purple. Thomas had let his hair grow out, his boyish features unnoticeable, and they looked almost like identical twins. That actually surprised him, but he was hardly one to judge. "Hey, you two are wearing that stuff because you want to, right?" They paused the game for the first time to look at him, both of them actually realizing that there was drama going on around them and that it might have something to do with them. Richard was glad he'd chosen the outfit he had; if he weren't wearing rainbow clothes himself, they'd probably have been less open. "Uh huh," Tamara answered honestly, slightly worried and wishing she'd been paying more attention, hoping that this rainbow teenager, whoever he was, wasn't there to upset things. Everything had been very good for her and her brother that summer. She got ice cream just by asking for it, and her brother could do almost anything he wanted. "Just making sure," Richard replied, smiling, trying to keep the threat out of his body language, and the kids relaxed. "Hey, wanna hear a secret?" Thomas asked, and Richard leaned his ear next to the boy's mouth, hoping that Thomas didn't have something weird planned. "They're scared of us," he whispered. Richard laughed. His hunch had been right; he was beating a dead horse. 'They're even more scared of me,' he might have whispered back, but instead, on a whim, he decided to whisper Thomas his Discord username. (What were the parents going to do if they found out? Subpoena Discord to track him down?) "I just wanted to make sure they weren't still doing weird shit to you, that's the only reason I came here," he said as he walked to the door. "Wait, who are you?" Tamara asked. "A hacker," Richard answered, smiling. "Look, do you at least want to tell me who sent you here?" Walter asked him quietly and very seriously, convinced that there was no way he could have planned this on his own. "The Illuminati," Richard answered on his way out, as Susie had suggested he might, his smile wider as he opened the door, suddenly realizing that he was about to walk out without asking the one thing he really, really wanted to know. "What the fuck were all of you thinking when you did that to him?" Walter sighed. "We thought it was going to lead to a better life for him." Richard stiffened instantly, his smile vanishing. 'For your own good.' The worst things always were. For a very brief moment, he considered shoving this mouse of a man out of the way, rushing up the stairs, kicking in the bedroom door, and beating Jodi to death with his bare hands, hopefully right in front of a webcam that would broadcast it to the world so it could be spread around on imageboards until the end of time. The moment passed, and he silently walked out. He briefly glanced behind him to make sure that he wasn't being followed, but Walter had already closed and audibly locked the door. Richard almost wanted to laugh by the time he made it back to the car (Caroline had parked around the block to stay out of sight), but it just wasn't funny, even if the good guys had won in the end. "You think they believed everything you told them?" Caroline asked when he was done recounting what happened. "Who even knows?" Richard asked. "Their mother was... just looking at her, you could tell she was out of it. She's not doing shit anymore. It's like what happened with our mom, times a hundred. When Tom said their parents were scared of them, he was right." "At least they're not doing the whole 'oh, it's in the past, forget about it' thing," Zoe said. Her mother doing that had been terrible. These people doing it would be unthinkable. "Nah, they got fucked over too hard," Richard said. "Leslie, I'll tell your parents, they can just delete those emails or whatever." He didn't noticed that his phone had gone off. "Oh, Tom actually added me." He spent the ride home texting, telling Leslie's parents that it really was over in that house and finding himself dragged into a Discord conversation about video games he didn't even play. He couldn't help but laugh. Video games! After all that shit, Tom's topic of choice was Diablo 3, a game Richard didn't even play. But then again, he was ten years old, a mostly normal kid with none of Richard's nature. They'd probably talk about other things later, but Richard wasn't going to bring that stuff up. (Besides, Tom was horrible to talk to. The kid had great spelling but rambled a lot because he was so happy and excited about getting such a powerful new friend.) Richard didn't realize how pleased Susie was with him until that night, when she gave him a very thorough demonstration.