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It's strange. One second they're surrounded by mist and nothing, spinning in a void of nothing, and then they're standing on solid ground. They glance at each other, emotions a mix of shock and confusion.Then Roi drops to the ground and kisses the grass, and suddenly they're all overwhelmingly happy. Ro starts crying, her face split by the biggest smile, and Safiya hugs her tight. She's laughing. Colleen falls onto her back, staring up at the blue sky. She feels like she hasn't seen it in ages. JC spins in a circle, staring at the trees around them. Listening to the birds chirp. Teala giggles and sits on the ground beside Colleen. She closes her eyes and inhales, relishing the smells of the world. They couldn't smell anything when they were in-between. Calliope and Mortimer wrap their arms around each other.The only one who doesn't seem happy is Manny. He looks conflicted, staring at the ground. The image of Nikita shooting at him is branded into his mind. He can't wipe it away.And yet… he's alive now, isn't he? As are all these people. He watched Colleen and Ro die, saw Safiya’s corpse on the floor of the lounge, but they're here. So are all the others.Of course, there is an absence of Matt and Nikita. He knows that they escaped, and it makes him happy. As did Joey, despite luring them into this in the first place. He notes that the car Matt and Rosanna drove in is missing. They must've taken it back to civilization.So how are they alive?His first thought is that maybe there was something like the Lazarus Harp that revived Matt. But they're standing outside Everlock, in the clearing where they created the doorway in the first place. It's still there, red curtain flapping in the wind, but now they can see the town beyond. Manny can hear laughter and carnival music, and sees the Ferris wheel spinning. The smell of popcorn fills his nose, and he wrinkles it. He can't stand it anymore.He hopes they never have to go back there.~They stay there for a while, relishing in the fact that they're alive. Then, JC brings up the big question: “Who wants to drive?”Colleen and Teala both point at Manny, who was the original van driver, anyways. He shrugs as JC tosses him the keys from beside the van.“Shotgun!” shouts Colleen, racing towards it. Roi grabs his motorcycle, and Safiya throws her bike in. JC does the same with his skateboard.They all climb in, except Roi, who climbs onto his motorcycle and revs the engine. There are only four seats in the back, so Mortimer and Calliope have to sit on the floor, but they don't seem to mind.Teala pulls her phone out from under a seat cushion and turns it on. Their two resident 70-ers stare in awe as the screen flashes to life and she begins to type. She checks the date, and her mouth falls open.“Holy shit, you guys, it's been a year. A year and three months, exactly. We've been gone for a year. It's 20-fucking-19.”“2019?” Calliope muses. “Oh, my. We really will be very new to this world.”“Everyone thought we were dead for over a year!” Ro exclaims, fingers tapping on the cushion. “Oh, no. My family must've been so shocked!”“God, our families… my best friend…” JC looks down. “And we were dead. But they still think we are.”“Wait…” Teala opens a news article. “You guys, ten other YouTubers disappeared three months ago.”“Joey,” Colleen says flatly from the front seat. “Of course. He probably had to do some other bullshit so he could blah blah something irrele-”Safiya cut her off. “What if he was bringing us back to life?”They hear Roi shout from outside the van. “Guys, it's 2019!”“We know!” Colleen yells out her open window. “We'll tell you about it later!”Then, her eyes widen. She puts a hand on her stomach. “Guys, do you think I'm still pregnant?”“WHAT?” shouts everyone inside their van.Right… they didn't know. She hadn't released a reveal video yet.“Sorry, I may have forgotten to mention it. Now you know! I just found out the day before all this shit happened.”Of course, they have questions. “Have you thought of any names?” Ro wants to know. “Who's the daddy?” Safiya asks, wiggling her eyebrows. Teala asks why she never told them. JC stays silent, but he smiles.“Guys! I’ll tell you once I know for sure, but I have a weird feeling that there might still be a baby in me,” Colleen says softly. “It definitely died when I did, but I think it came back with me, too.”“I hope you're right,” Manny says with a grin. “You'd make such a good mom! I can feel it. You have good mom vibes.”“You do,” agrees Ro.Then, Manny suddenly jerks the van to a halt. Colleen spins around to see that they're stopping for, and her fingernails dig into the sides of the seat. She hears Roi’s motorcycle buzz to a halt too.There, standing in the center of the road, is Joey Graceffa. And behind him is a group of 9 mostly familiar people, all dressed in old-fashioned clothing.Manny bangs his head on the steering wheel.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Once the eight inside the van get out, there's a long moment where the two groups just stare at each other. Colleen notes a familiar woman in a huge yellow dress with her arm around a man with a red handkerchief tucked into his shirt, and a few others that she's fairly certain she knows. Liza Koshy and Gabbie Hanna are the two she definitely recognizes, and, of course, Joey himself.
When Roi speaks, there's an undertone of shock and pleasant surprise. “Alex?”
The man with the red handkerchief blinks. He reaches up and rubs his eyes. “Roi? Is that you?”
“Alex!” And Roi takes off. Alex breaks into a run too, and the two embrace between the groups, nearly falling to the ground in the middle of the street. Roi lets out a giggle that turns into a laugh of pure joy.
Colleen approaches Joey next, almost cautiously. “Thanks for killing me,” she says coldly. Then, she tips her head to the side. “Though I guess it did pay off. Friends?” She holds out a hand.
Joey nods. “Friends.” He takes her hand and pulls her into a hug.
Something happens all at once. Colleen’s eyes widen. So do Joey's. Teala screams, and one by one, the 70s guests, along with Calliope and Mortimer, fall to the ground.
Colleen slips out of Joey’s arms, and they all see clearly the ghastly wounds littering her body. The others look similar - blood pools underneath Manny from multiple bullet wounds, Roi sags into Alex, his throat gushing blood and black veins crawling up his face, and Safiya clutches a dark red stain on her stomach. Joey leaps back from Colleen and Alex carefully lays Roi’s body on the ground before covering his mouth with a hand.
“Joey, what did you do?” Liza asks, in a voice edging on hysterical.
“I don't know! I only hugged her!”
As nine of them lay still, miles away, Matthew and Stephanie Patrick are filming a video.
They're midway through the game they're livestreaming, Stephanie wracked with giggles, when suddenly, Matt coughs loudly.
At first, Steph doesn't think much of it. She pats his back and continues playing. But when he coughs again, this time blood comes out and hits the carpet.
It's noticed by viewers, who fill the comments with worried messages. Steph drops her controller and helps her husband as he leans over the couch, coughing up huge spurts of blood.
“Call an ambulance!”
she shouts over the top of the camera. “I'm so sorry, guys, we're gonna have to cut this short. Health issues. Bye!” She hastily ends the livestream as Matt collapses, dark bruises appearing on his neck and face.
“Oh, my God. Holy shit. Matt? Matt, talk to me. Matt!”
His eyes go wide as she tries desperately to lay him down gently, and his breathing suddenly stops.
Steph shouts “Jason! Hurry!”, and when she looks back down, her heart nearly stops.
The right side of his face is a bloody mess, skull caved in, blood and bruises staining the rest of it. Bruises in the shapes of fingerprints are on his neck, and his one visible eye is frozen wide. His mouth is half-open in shock, and he's not moving.
Steph puts two fingers on his neck. Nothing.
Did I check in the wrong place?
She tries a little bit to the side. Still nothing. “No, no, no,” she mutters. “Matt? Matt!” She shakes him.
As sirens begin to wail in the distance, Stephanie Patrick holds her husband’s body and sobs into his bloody shirt.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
It's a flash of light, a high-pitched whine in their ears, and suddenly they're all standing in a void of blank white. All 10 of them.
There's a moment of silence as they all just
look
at each other for a moment, taking in the horrible wounds and dark bloodstains, and then Rosanna lets out a cry of joy. She flings herself into Matt’s arms, and the Detective embraces her tearfully. After a moment, they pull Safiya in too, and the three share a group hug.
Once they pull apart, there's the big question of
What the fuck just happened?
“Well, you were all already dead, right?” Matt asks. It's a little disconcerting for them all, looking into his half-destroyed face. “You've been gone for over a year. I thought I was going to stay alive forever, though. That feeling when you die in the middle of a livestream.” He rolls his eyes.
“Yowch. We were brought back,” Manny says, checking his nails. “We don't really know how. We ran into Joey and this other group on our way home. I think they're the YouTubers that died the year before. I recognized some of them!”
“Joey and Colleen hugged right before this happened to us, right?” Safiya mentions, and instantly all the eyes in the group go to Colleen.
“What? This isn't my fault!” she complains. “I wouldn't screw our second chance at life up. But as soon as I touched his hand, there was like… a little jolt of energy.”
“Like when you shock yourself?” JC wonders.
“Yeah, exactly. But it was a little more painful. More like getting a paper cut.”
“Hold on, honey,” Manny intervenes. “Those are two completely different things.”
“No, they're not!” Teala pipes up.
“Uh, have you ever gotten a paper cut? It only hurts after, when you poke it and shit!”
“Guys, this really isn't the time,” Mortimer says, running a hand through his hair nervously.
Calliope nods. “We must figure out how to return.”
The guests all looked at each other. “Any ideas?” Roi asks. “I've got nothing.”
“Guys?” Rosanna nervously says. “Look over there!”
Heads turn and eyes widen as a ball of light zooms towards them, faster than anything. Colleen screams and Matt wraps an arm protectively around Ro, and then it strikes.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The light moves around them like a sun-fueled shield, trapping their ragtag group in a dome. For a moment, there's a worry that maybe this is it, that they're dead and trapped in this void forever. Then, the dome begins to expand.
Rosanna reaches for Matt as his body flickers like a broken hologram. He vanishes unceremoniously, his wide eyes the last thing they see.
Then, they're standing on the street again. Or rather, lying. With a jolt, all of the guests from the 70s are back where they were before, their wounds healing as they watch. Safiya watches the blood clean itself from her sweater. Rosanna puts a hand on her chest wound and it comes back clean. Teala touches her neck. It no longer hurts when she presses on it.
But they're alive again. They're not trapped, they're in control of their bodies and alive.
Even once they're fully healed, though, strange things still happen. Roi pokes at two tiny fangs that emerge from his teeth. Colleen yanks a bright orange hair off her head, only for it to grow back instantly. It takes them all a moment to realize what's happening to them, as Ro pokes at stubs of horns on the sides of her head and JC scrubs at a white streak that's appeared under one of his eyes. Safiya says it first.
“We're turning into the monsters that killed us,” she breathes, feeling the indentation of a comically angry face on the right side of her neck. “If that keeps happening, we could become them forever.”
As they contemplate this in shocked silence, miles away, Matt jerks awake.
He sucks in a gasp, fingers digging into the carpet below him. Steph is hovering over him, and her face turns disbelieving as his face begins to knit itself back together.
“What the hell?” she says slowly, running a hand through her hair. “You were dead. I saw you die. What happened?”
“I don't know,” he says. “I-”
His expression turns confused as he watches the circle of red surrounding his head get smaller and smaller until finally disappearing.
“I don't know,” he mutters quietly.
Steph pulls him into a tight hug, and then sirens wail in the distance.
“So… I may have called an ambulance. You started coughing up blood while livestreaming to millions of viewers, Matt. And we're gonna talk about that later. But for now, you're getting to the hospital, and we're gonna make sure you're okay.”
As he shakily stands to help pick up the stuff that got knocked over, three black veins pulse on his arm, unseen to either of them for the moment.
~
“Okay. So if this works like you say it does, I could theoretically poke Joey fifty times and turn into a harpy?” Liza says with a grin. They're all sitting on the grass near a pit stop, ignoring the inquiring stares at their outfits. “That's hella cool. I don't know what I'd do with all those gross feathers, though.”
Teala suddenly grabs Safiya’s arm, her eyes wide. “This is gonna sound really weird, but… if the monster that killed one of the guys had a bigger dick than him? Would his dick grow with every transformation?”
“Teala,” JC says slowly. “I don't want to think about having a clown dick.”
“Yeah, but the clown that killed you was a lady,” she replies. Then, the inevitable: “Wait! Would you grow a va-”
“End of discussion!” Alex interrupts, nearly dropping his Snickers bar on his face. He's lying on the grass with Lauren, her head on his chest, and they're eating some of the junk food they got from the vending machines.
“Seconded,” she adds from beside him. “Let’s talk about what we're doing next.”
“The first set of guests doesn't have a car, or any way to get home,” Joey says. He's been silent for most of the time, but now he’s sharing a bag of Doritos with Manny.
“I don't know about you, but I'm so ready to just go home,” Gabbie says, sticking out her tongue. “The other guests are important too, but can't we come back later? With more vans and motorcycles?” She waves a hand in the air for emphasis.
“We can't just leave them out in the middle of nowhere,” Ro interjects. She stands, empty M&M bag in one hand. “They don't deserve to be stranded out there for so long!”
“And I know the location,” Joey adds. “Plus, once I get home, I won't be leaving for a while. You can't just enter this place into Google Maps, I have to lead you there.”
Gabbie sighs. “Ugh, fine. If you're all up for it, I guess. How are we all going to fit in the van?”
Safiya snaps her fingers. “We don't. Some of us can stay here and rest up, while the rest of us can go find the others! LA is only about fifty miles from here. If we go fast, it’ll take a few hours to get everyone there.”
“It's a plan, then?” Destorm says coldly. “I don't care, as long as I can see my kid sooner.” He and Alex glare at each other for a moment before looking away.
“Yeah, we're gonna do this,” Jesse says, the words sounding almost sinister in his deep voice. Or maybe that's his Outlaw outfit and the gun holstered at his hip.
“Okay, then!” Tana says, her tone forcibly optimistic. “At least it's not life or death anymore. Who's going in the first group?”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Every day, Eva wishes she could forget what happened.
The first few months, she's plagued by nightmares. Justine sobbing as they force her in the coffin. Matt’s haunted gaze as he tells them that Sierra is dead. A gunshot breaking the near silence, Tim slumping over the table in front of her. Oli and Lele screaming. Lele dying.
Over time, it gets better. She talks to Oli and Joey, and they try to regain some sense of a normal life. Making videos, going to therapy, drinking enough coffee to kill a small elephant. It's her way of coping. But the nightmares don't stop. Sure, they became less frequent, but every night, she goes to sleep wondering who would be in her dreams tonight.
Then, Joey vanishes. Soon after, the next group disappears too. Another mass kidnapping, police claim. She knows better.
Tyler Oakley and Andrea Russett return. Without Joey. It's like a lightning strike to her heart, that one-third of their little group gone forever.
Or not.
The next year, Joey Graceffa returns alive and well, along with Matthew Patrick and Nikita Dragun, in the wake of seven more deaths (including her good friend Teala Dunn). At first, she's happy that Joey is alive, and tried to contact him again. Oli even flies to Los Angeles just so they can greet him together.
But something is different about him. Upon seeing them, he gives them a brief smile and ducks away from Eva’s hug. He won't meet their gazes.
They talk to Matt, later. As it turns out, Joey had chosen to willingly put his friends into this death game this time. The three of them talk for a long time. Joey’s spot in their trio is now empty, and Matt fills it.
On the exact same date in 2019, as predicted, ten YouTubers disappear. They wait patiently to see what happens.
Now, on the day the survivors have returned for the last three years, Eva watches strange things unfold.
First, no one returns. Usually, they make their way to a city or town at around 9 am or earlier, but nothing happens for a long time. News stations speculate whether they are all dead this time. Eva hopes not.
At around 3 pm, Matt does a livestream. Eva doesn't watch it, but she sees the articles popping up everywhere.
Matthew Patrick is dead.
He was said to have died on the livestream, and in reality, no one really knows what happened. She panics, and panics, and panics. How? Why?
But then it's revealed that he's not dead after all. The story that's told to the public is that his heart failed, or something similar. He
was
dead. But he's not anymore, and that's all that matters to Eva.
Then, just before she goes to the hospital, something happens that completely blindsides Eva. It's a shot to the heart. She feels like she's been struck by lightning, poisoned from the inside out and now she's hollow.
Because they're alive. All of them.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Life is a funny thing.
One minute you're a ghost, floating around in darkness. A shell of yourself, thinking about your life, your death, what you accomplished. It's really not much in the grand scheme of things, is it? There's so much you wish you could've done, so much you still want to do. Go skydiving. Get married. Pet a lion. But there's no chance to do any of it, ever again. You don't know how your family was told.
You're just… gone.
But then you get it all back. All those steps you didn't take, all your friends you didn't make, you can do it all now. You have the time.
You're free again.
This is what Safiya thinks as she sits on the porch of an old mansion, dangling her legs off the edge. She's eating ice cream with Ro. They bought it at the closest gas station, only about half a mile away.
It's weird. All this horror, all this sacrifice, and there was a gas station not even a mile away. So close to civilization.
Safiya lets out a short laugh at the mystery of it all. The fact that a few hours ago, she was dead, and now she's eating ice cream in 90° weather with the sweetest woman on the planet. Really, it seems impossible.
They wait for Joey, Colleen, and Liza to retrieve the guests inside. It was weirder for the first set of guests - they had apparently come back to life in the places they'd died, rather than outside the gates, like how Safiya’s guests came back. It's been a few minutes since they arrived here, and Joey had been content to let them stay out here and eat their ice cream.
Ro is just taking her first bite of the cone when the front door swings open suddenly. A man in a pinstriped suit saunters out, a grin on his face. “Hello, sunshine!” he declares. Then, spotting the two girls, he quickly adds, “Not you two. I mean the actual sunshine. God, it's so nice to be
alive!”
He sings the last word with a flourish of his hat, which Safiya didn't see before but he's apparently been holding in his hand.
Just before the door swings closed again, a smaller woman draped in jewels skitters out. “It's so bright!” she gasps, covering her eyes for a moment. “Whoa. I forgot how green the grass was!” She hurries down the steps, then kicks off her high heels to run on the lawn.
Safiya slips off the porch and turns towards the front door as it opens again. A nervous-looking man with neatly combed hair and a brown jacket walks out, hands shoved in his pockets. He covers his eyes with a hand briefly before hurrying off the porch and towards the van nearby, barely sparing Saf and Ro a second glance.
“Do you think we should talk to him?” Ro asks worriedly. “He still seems kind of shaken.”
“I mean, it takes a moment, right?” Safiya replies. “We died brutally after a night of hell and fear, and then suddenly we have a second chance? It's hard to take in.”
They hear a shout of, “No!” from somewhere around the back, and then a series of thumps. The girl on the lawn screams and collapses on the grass, seizing wildly, and the man by the van begins to cough up blood. He falls too. The man in the pinstripe suit just collapses, not at all gracefully, tumbling onto the asphalt. Safiya flinches as she notices a red mark on the side of his head, blood spilling out rapidly. It pools around him in a red halo.
“Oh, no!” Ro cries, skittering towards the girl. She convulses a few more times before going still.
“This is like what happened to us,” Safiya remarks, carefully checking the man in the suit’s pulse. There isn't one, of course. He's gone, temporarily.
“So give it a few minutes?” Ro asks anxiously. “How long were we out, anyways?”
“A few minutes sounds about right,” she responds carefully. She studies the man’s face, looking for any visible changes. Her hand goes up to touch the tiny, imprinted sad face on the left side of her neck. He doesn't seem to be changing at all, thankfully.
Near the van, Destorm has hopped out to examine the man in the brown jacket’s dead body. He scans it with a somewhat haughty gaze, and Safiya again reminds herself why they brought him along.
He has a kid,
she tells herself.
And we needed to keep him away from Alex. Kid, Alex. Kid, Alex. Don't forget, no matter how much he gets on your nerves.
They wait.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
As he lies in a hospital bed, alone for the first time in a while, Matt gets a chance to contemplate everything.
It's been a year since he returned from Everlock. He's never really tried to think about what happened; in fact, he took all of those painful memories and locked them away. He still knew what happened, though. Just not the specifics.
But something about dying again unlocked that little box, and now he can't stop remembering.
Every time he closes his eyes, it's all there is. Rosanna's screams in the distance. Safiya’s corpse on the ground. The Strong Man in front of him.
“Are you ready to die?”
That horrifying, overwhelming fear of knowing that he was, in fact, going to die.
And then he wakes up, usually. Sometimes he's unlucky enough to reach the point where he's beaten to death by the Strong Man, but he usually jerks awake around the second or third strike.
Now, Matt just stares at the ceiling. Listens to the repetitive ticking of the clock on the wall.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The longer he listens to it, the more disconnected he feels. Then, very suddenly, it stops.
He looks over at it for a moment. The second hand has stopped dead on the 12. The time is exactly 6:00 PM.
The door to his room slams open.
He nearly has a heart attack. But it's only Eva, disheveled as she may look, and she races to his side.
“Have you seen the news? Matt! Have you seen the news?!” Her hair is askew, her eyes wild, and her nails dig into his shoulders as she shakes him violently
“No! What? Who survived this year?” He didn't know many of the people that went in this year, but frankly, he hopes Jenna Marbles made it. He really liked her videos. And her dogs.
“That's the thing,” she mutters, nearly to herself. Eva scrambles for the TV remote and turns it on. She has to flip through a couple of channels, but finally she finds it.
He sees the bold headline first.
ABDUCTED YOUTUBERS FOUND
His first thought is,
Everyone? Everyone from this year is alive? That's great!
Then he listens to the two reporters, a woman named Samantha Parikh and a man named Doug Forney. Samantha is saying something that he doesn't process, at first, until she starts listing names.
Safiya Nygaard, DeStorm Power, GloZell Green, Rosanna Pansino, Shane Dawson, Liza Koshy, Colleen Ballinger, and Joey Graceffa have all been found alive.
Her name repeats like a broken record in his mind, over and over.
Rosanna Pansino has been found alive.
Rosanna Pansino.
Rosanna.
Ro is alive.
He watches as their photos appear on the screen, and his heart wrenches to see Ro's smile again. He hasn't seen that smile in what feels like forever.
Safiya too. And Colleen.
But how?
“Is it real?” he asks, grabbing Eva's hand with an intensity he didn't know he had. “Eva,
is it real?”
Steph bursts in a moment later, hand over her mouth. It's clear from her expression that she knows what's going on.
Matt feels tears slide down his cheeks as he hears Doug tell them about other survivors, about how everyone,
everyone
from the mass abductions is said to be alive.
Eva gasps at this, and he thinks that she might not have heard the whole story. She stares at the screen for a moment, then her mouth breaks into a smile.
Images, pictures of all of them begin to scroll over the screen, starting with Shane. The three of them in the room watch the channel for what feels like forever, listening to the newscasters talk about Eva, Matt, Nikita, all of the original survivors.
“How?” he mumbles. “I watched Safiya die. I held her body. And Ro… I heard her scream. I
heard
her. How?”
“I don't care,” Eva says softly. “They may not be the same, they could be something evil, but I don't care. They're
alive,
Matt!”
He lets himself smile. “They are.”
He turns to the nurse that entered a minute ago. “How much paperwork would it take to get to them right now?”
~
They let him off with a wheelchair and a sharp warning. Steph and Eva take turns wheeling him across exactly two parking lots. The hospital's, and the police station's.
They ride the elevator up to where they'll be, and Matt thinks his heart might burst from his chest. They're here. They're
here,
holy fuck. When he listens, he thinks he can hear Safiya's calm voice saying something. Colleen yelling about seeing her baby.
The doors ding open, and there she is. Looking the same way she did when he said goodbye to her for the last time, adorable hat and all.
She turns, and sees him the same time he sees her. In a split-second, he decides,
Fuck the wheelchair!
and leaps up to meet her.
Her warm arms around him are one of the best things he's ever felt. He's dimly aware of Eva and Shane talking, but it's all irrelevant. Except for Safiya and Colleen, who come to join them. They all share a group hug, which feels strange, considering everything.
Screw strange. They're alive, and that's all that matters now.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Exactly 1 year later…
“I still can't believe it's over forever,” Joey says, with a nearly breathless laugh. His head is tilted up to the sky, eyes closed. It's 2020. The 4-year anniversary of the dinner party Joey Graceffa first invited his friends to, not knowing that eight of them would die. And they're having a pool party. Not completely without mourning, of course. Ten YouTubers died one year ago. But it was to bring back the others, and they're grateful for that. There have, of course, been a few more… incidents. And now Rosanna has two horns twisting from either side of her head, a couple more pairs of eyes blink at them on Jesse's face, and Sierra forever looks like she just accidentally snorted soda up her nose. But that's okay. Or so they've managed to convince the public. “It's a fashion choice,” Lauren argued when she first flashed her vampire fangs to the world. “Vampires are very sexy,” Alex agreed, from behind the camera. Hiding giant shoulder-spikes and big horns is harder, although Rosanna managed to pull off the horns with style in her own videos. Alex chose to be a bit more secretive. Some were harder to contain. But more or less, they all looked human. Colleen could dye her hair, and Safiya made it a part of her videos to try strange DIY face molds that she secretly used to hide the protruding expressions on her neck. And they all tried to stay away from Joey. But this day was the exception. Today, they were going to party. Already, Lele balances on top of the diving board. She looks down, a huge grin on her face, and then screams, “Cannonball!” Everyone tried to run. Some of them don't quite make it, and quite a few YouTubers get soaked. Eva dives into the pool after Lele and chases her underwater. And for the most part, everyone laughs and has a good time. But not everyone recovers so easily. It has only been a year, after all, since most of them had been resurrected. Some of them still aren't completely comfortable with everyone else, with what had happened. So they meet inside Joey's house, in his living room, surrounded by plush chairs and pillows. Justine, Matt Haag, Gabbie, Colleen, Manny. Just the five of them. Marked forever with the memory of their deaths, and the horrible experience that preceded them. Healing isn't an immediate process. It takes time, energy, and hope. Hope that it will get better. Hope that, watching the others splash and have fun outside, that that could be them. That they will recover. That they will be happy again.