Stanley originally came here to do what he always did which was play videogames or trolling the internet but this time around he couldn't muster the desire to do any of the usual. Instead, he has been watching Ezraphel give his sister a tour of the house via the various security cameras. It really put into perspective the extent of the changes she brought on, both known and unknown to him.
*Knock-knock-knock*
"The door's open," he called out, making sure to exit the security camera app and put away his phone.
At the confirmation, Natalie let herself in and began looking around before whistling, "Wow, this place looks exactly the same."
"Can't fix what ain't broken." He answered easily enough, "What do you want?"
Natalie locked the door behind her before she answered, "Something to drink would be nice."
To that end, Stanley got off the chair and reached for the minifridge. "I got Coke, Mountain Dew, Monster Energy, G-Fuel, and Gamersupps."
"I thought Ezraphel got rid of those things because of your diet."
"She got rid of the ones in the kitchen fridge, but she's not touching anything in my office," said Stan while Natalie grabbed the second gaming chair in the corner and dragged it over towards him.
"Yes, truly, this room has never seen the touch of a woman," she wryly noted before plopping herself on the chair.
He raised an unimpressed brow. "Virgin gamer jokes, really?"
Natalie gave him a cheeky smile while leaning back to stretch out like a cat. "You make it so easy, little brother."
"Whatever," he said, rolling his eyes. "So you want that drink or..." He purposefully trailed off.
"I'll take the coke," she eventually answered. "You can't go wrong with coke."
"What about Pepsi?"
"You shut your whore mouth, blasphemer!"
Stanley snorted at the exaggerated retort, tossing her a can and taking out a bottle of Gamersupps he premixed in a 'waifu cup.'
Upon seeing the image on the shaker cup, Natalie paused in her drink to say, "See, it's stuff like this that gives people free ammo to make fun of you."
"Yeah, well, I'm young, rich, successful, and have the hottest girlfriend in the world" he shot back not even looking smug "and I did it all without generational wealth, online grifting, doing crypto scams, or making a fool out of myself for other people's entertainment."
"Not so sure on that last part," Natalie commented with a cheeky smile.
Stanley said nothing as he took a swig from his shaker cup before asking, "So what did you want to talk about?"
For a while, Natalie said nothing as she took a languid sip of her carbonated beverage, all the while keeping her eyes on her brother. Finally, she leaned forward, holding both hands on the can while keeping her eyes on him.
"God, it really is so weird seeing you like this."
"Yeah, sometimes I wake up in the morning, catch my reflection in the mirror, and think some dickhead broke into my house."
"Wouldn't you be the dickhead then?" she snickered.
"Point still stands," he said, ignoring the jab. "I get that I don't look the way I did last time we saw each other in person."
"No kidding."
"Just do what I do."
"What's that?"
"Get over yourself." He answered plainly and with a straight face.
For a moment, Natalie stared before breaking out into laughter. "Oh my God! I don't know why I expected something profound for a second there."
"That is weird," he said as he took another swig of her beverage.
A moment later, Natalie's laughter died down. "I missed you, Stan."
She grunted in response.
"So articulate," she quipped, though the smile diminished as she reached a hand to swipe her left bang behind her ear. "Look about what I said yesterday; I'm so..."
"Nothing to be sorry about," he interrupted.
"Stan-"
"We've been over this, Nat," he was scowling now. "I'm trying to get over it; you should too."
Natalie wanted to say something but hesitated before ultimately discarding the topic entirely: "Okay, fine, but you have to do something for me."
He straightened up. "What's that?"
"I need you to get over my impending death."
This made Stanley's scowl return in full force: "You're not going to die."
"YES, I AM!" Natalie suddenly yelled before taking a breath to calm herself. "Yes, I am Stan. Terminal cancer is a bitch like that."
"What if it doesn't have to be?"
"What are you talking about?" she groaned.
He put away his shaker cup for his next word as he pinned Natalie with a serious look: "What if you didn't have to die?"
"What part of terminal cancer do you not comprehend right now?"
"Hypothetically," he began carefully, only to be interrupted.
"Stan, just stop," Natalie said with an air of solemn finality.
"…fine"
He grabbed his shaker cup and took an aggressive swig, uncaring of the drink running down his chin and splashing on his shirt.
After wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, Stanley posed the question, "Now what?"
Natalie drummed her fingers on the chair's armrest for a moment before answering, "Ezraphel."
This caused him to stiffen. "What about her?"
"What's her deal?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, that woman is clearly not from around here. Even if the accent wasn't a dead giveaway, the way she talks, the way she moves, how she expresses herself and the way she looks…" Natalie trailed off before shaking her head "I'm pretty sure she's a foreigner because they don't grow them like that out here unless she's been under a surgical knife half a dozen times at least" her eyes narrowed "and I don't think she has."
"She hasn't," Stanley confirmed, "and if she has, I sure as hell didn't pay for it."
"Normally, I'd believe that, but it's pretty obvious she has you wrapped around her finger with how much you let her get away with."
"Bullshit"
"Then how the hell do you explain the new furniture and renovations?"
"Magic"
The answer was unexpected enough but how he said it so promptly without missing a beat and with a straight face actually gave Natalie pause.
"Uh what?"
"You heard me," he said, folding his arms.
"Magic?"
"Yeah"
"Is this your excuse for turning into a simp in the year that I wasn't looking?"
"I'm not a simp."
"Yes, you are."
Ignoring the retort, he continued, "And I didn't spend a single dime on any of Ez's renovations."
"Forgive me if I'm skeptical about that."
"Ask her yourself."
"I think I will...later," she added. "As for now, I want you to explain this."
As she spoke, Natalie fished out her phone and showed him the screen. Upon said screen was...
He made a face. "You use Tik Tok?"
"Focus Stanley."
He already was, and the video in question was of a familiar place, taken from the shaky first-person view of a go-pro attached to a helmet. The caption on the screen read: Playing Airsoft Against Batman, and the video itself was of the time Stanley managed to pull what he deemed the 'Arkham maneuver' where he used his superhuman abilities to go around the maze-like corridors of the field and pick other players off one by one. For the last guy who, by that point, was panicking and twitchy
"Shit-shit-shit, where is he!" were the panicked words of the unfortunate airsoft player as his head moved about.
"Behind you," came the gruff, growl-like answer from directly behind him.
"AAH!" he spun around, but unfortunately he was shot before he even managed to make the full turn, and the video ended with the go-pro catching sight of Stanley's dye mask.
By the end, Natalie pulled the phone away with a raised eyebrow. "Well?"
Whatever she was expecting from him, clearly, his reaction to the clip was not in that realm of possibilities.
"What the fuck!?"
"Not the reaction I expected."
"Where the hell did you get that?"
"It's from an account that does reposts of viral clips."
"Viral…" Stanley muttered before his eyes widened, and he swiftly turned in his chair towards his computer, hoping against hope.
Stanley knew that his stunt in the Airsoft arena would generate some buzz. Despite being a recognizable recreational activity, Airsoft is still rather niche, but it has its own community. That aside, he and his friends are all currently relevant content creators with decently large followings. He took all this into consideration when he went along with his plan and figured that whatever he did wouldn't generate enough interest to be noticed by a wider audience, and even then, it wouldn't gain enough traction to last more than a day at best.
It helped that out of his friends Jamie was the only one who could and had Stanley's permission to make a video out of the footage and post it on his main channel without any issue. It was one of the benefits of being a variety channel with a focus on the weird, wacky, and obscure. The video titled I Beat the Airsoft God was posted, and it was a resounding success, earning over a million views within hours, but despite the success of the video, nothing really came from it other than some initial interest that was rather mild.
It made sense; after all, despite having millions of subscribers and being an internet icon in his own right, Jamie was only one person. It also helped that his unique and dry editing style of the video didn't lend itself to sensationalizing. As a matter of fact, Stanley was barely in the video itself, as the bulk of it was taken by Jamie doing his unique style of commentary with a spattering of highlights from his camera perspective. Jamie went out of his way not to implicate him. None of his friends, not even Amelia, were clout-chasing content whores and respected his privacy enough not to opine on the events through their own content.
Unfortunately, as he began to peruse the various social media platforms in regards to that clip, he found that he had overlooked something that, in hindsight, he should have taken into consideration. He and his friends weren't the only ones recording footage that day. The other team had people who were apparently also recording, and the reason he hadn't seen any of their clips this past month was because they posted the clips on Tik Tok.
Stanley didn't use Tik Tok, so the finer details of its mechanics and how it functions as a platform are mostly obscure to him. Really, the only thing he knew about it was that it primarily operates via short-form videos, is the most popular social media platform for Generation Z (aka Zoomers), is infamously known for the proliferation of online brain rot, and is owned by a Chinese company that may or may not put spyware in it. Though at this point what social media platform didn't have some form of spyware in it?
Well, clearly, he underestimated the damn thing because the clips featuring his Airsoft performance managed to go viral on it. It wasn't an instant sensation, but from his investigation (brief as it was), the situation was more like the clips caught the attention of a Tik Tok creator with a large audience who reposted them. From there, he's assuming it then got shared on Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube.
"Fuck!"
"So I'm taking that reaction as a 'yes' to my question," commented Natalie as she took another sip of Coke.
Stanley sighed "How did you figure?"
"You know I follow you and anyone you actually hang out with on social media."
Stanley nodded as she told him this before with the excuse that "of course I'm going to keep tabs on the people my grumpy anti-social little brother befriends."
Natalie looked back at her phone. "I didn't think it was you at first since you looked so different, but after seeing you and Ez, I made the connection."
Wait…
"What does Ez have to do with it?"
In lieu of a verbal answer, she brought up the picture of Ezraphel with one hand slung over his neck, squishing his face (thankfully covered by a dye mask) into her right boob while the other made a piece of art over her eye while she winked and made a kissy face at the camera.
"I told her to delete that shit!"
"Come on, Stan, you already know the rules about posting anything on the internet."
"I know that!" Stanley snapped.
You put anything on the internet, especially in the past decade, and it's there forever.
'Which means it's only a matter of time before someone figures out that I'm the one behind the mask' he thought before pinching the bridge of his nose.
Surprisingly, the thought of people finding out was not as alarming as it otherwise would have been.
'Maybe it wouldn't be so bad,' a traitorous part of his mind thought.
The clips themselves weren't too bad; they certainly didn't show even a fraction of the frankly incredible things Stan did to effectively run circles around that team. Actually, none of them had that kind of footage—not the opposing team, not his friends, and not even Stanley himself. It turns out Stanley's camera wasn't of high enough quality to catch his feats of superhuman speed, resulting in a good chunk of footage that was basically a blurry, unusable mess.
"What are you thinking?" Natalie asked.
"Just wondering if I should rip the band-aid off and reveal I'm the guy in that video."
Natalie's eyes widened. "Like a reveal-reveal?"
"Hell no," he scowled.
He will never willingly show his face on the internet. That way leads to unnecessary drama and harassment.
"I mean if you play your cards right, you could totally milk the attention for some adsense revenue," Natalie spoke while rubbing her chin "maybe even a sponsorship from those airsoft brands."
"That's not what I was actually going for."
Sure, Stanley wasn't above doing stuff like that, specifically when the thing he is milking is something directly related to him, but not in this particular instance.
His sister posed the question, "then what were going for?"
"I was actually thinking about expanding my brand."
"To include airsoft?"
"…yeah."
"I'm surprised you didn't do that already." She commented, "It's not like it's a secret or anything."
She was right about that; he freely admitted on livestreams that he was an airsoft enthusiast and even showed off some of his gear at one point to curious viewers. He even almost showed highlight clips on his channels but opted not to since he wanted to preserve the authenticity of his channel, which focuses on gaming. He was also a bit self-conscious about posting IRL stuff in general.
"What changed?"
Natalie's question gave him pause.
What changed, indeed?
"Some stuff happened recently, and I've been reevaluating my life."
"You want to talk about it?"
"I..." he trailed off.
After a stretch of silence, Natalie sighed, "Look, you don't have to if you don't want to."
"But it's healthier if I do, right?"
Natalie scoffed. "Yeah, but when do you ever do what's good for your health if it's not enjoyable?"
"Since Ezraphel managed to convince me, she cares more about me than anyone or anything in the universe, including me," he said with a far-off expression.
Natalie's eyes widened. "Wow, you managed to say that with a straight face."
Just then there was a knock at the door before Ezraphel poked her head inside. "Sorry for interrupting, but I just wanted to let you know that lunch is ready."
"And speak of the devil," Natalie swiveled her chair around before getting to her feet. "Right on time, I am freaking starving right now."
As Natalie walked closer, Ezraphel's gaze went to Stanley, who remained seated. "Aren't you coming, Stanley?"
As she said this, Natalie turned to look at him as well.
"Yeah just give me a minute."
Natalie's frown became pensive, while Ezraphel simply nodded. As the two left, Stanley's enhanced hearing picked up the beginnings of a conversation.
"You know Stan was just talking about you."
"Was he?"
He tuned them out right then and sighed, putting back the drink in the mini-fridge before wiping his face.
"What the hell am I doing?" he groaned before shaking his head as he headed out.
'It's fine; I still have time. I don't need to rush this."
[It's not like her life depends on it or anything.]
Stanley paused as the urge to hit something abruptly spiked before he took a very deep and calming breath.
'Tomorrow, I'll talk to her about it tomorrow.'
~To Be Continued~