Welcome, Newbie
I turned the problem over for a while, trying to decide what kind of post to write.
Better to lock in a handle first, right?
If I was ever going to become a named regular, a half-fixed nickname wouldn't cut it. I needed a name that actually stayed put. It mattered, in its own way.
"Well. Not like that part's so important anyway."
I decided to settle it roughly and move on. Sitting there fretting wasn't going to conjure a decent nickname out of thin air, and the part that truly mattered was somewhere else.
"The first post. What am I even supposed to write."
Honestly, it was the one thing I couldn't help being careful about.
"Something they'll take a liking to, if I can manage it."
Stir the pot from the very first line and I'd only make myself unlikeable. Worse, if somebody decided to fixate on me, that would be a real disaster. They might start suspecting I was human. So the first post had better be nothing but a safe little hello.
"All right."
I put up a simple post.
Now the reaction was what mattered most. That alone was enough to knot me up. If the post I'd written gave off even a hint of human...
No. It wouldn't have. For now, all I could do was hope. Hope there was nothing wrong with it.
They were, unexpectedly, pretty generous about a newbie showing up. The comments themselves weren't bad, and that let me loosen up, if only a little. Enough that I could almost pretend this was an ordinary gallery. So I answered the replies the way anyone would, as if none of it meant anything.
Maybe I should put up another post.
Playing the pure little newbie, I decided to drop one more.
I kept writing replies, and let out a small sigh.
Is this about enough?
I didn't need to become a named regular in a hurry. There wasn't any information I absolutely had to get this second, so there was no point forcing posts out. Spam the board and I'd only make myself unlikeable.
That was when a few more comments came in.
Tips?
Was there something I was supposed to know? I wasn't so much startled as faintly suspicious.
What the hell was this guy?
Something about the way he talked was greasy, and it pissed me off. Honestly, the only reason it was frightening was that I knew he was an anomaly. If this had been a gallery full of ordinary people, that was the kind of voice I'd have called a dumbass and blocked on the spot. I almost answered with a curse out of habit, then swallowed it. It might have been a trap, a way to make me slip. I settled myself and wrote the comment as kindly as I could manage.
He was going to post something?
I couldn't help being thrown. I'd never imagined anyone would just come out and offer to show me something, straight up.
What the hell is he trying to show me?
Unpleasant imaginings crawled up the back of my neck. If I looked, and something went wrong...
Not like I can just not look, though.
Whatever else I skipped, the comments were something I had to answer. It was a little frightening, but once the post went up I'd have to see it. I refreshed the gallery and waited for whatever that DisguiseLover was about to drop.
It wasn't long before a new post climbed to the top of the board.
The title alone carried a faint, unpleasant smell. I didn't let the tension go, and I opened it.
"..."
The moment I looked at the screen, my thoughts cut out. What showed through that too-vivid display was malice itself, an atrocity so complete that human language had no business trying to name it.
In the photo, something you could not call a person's shape had been crumpled in on itself. Arms and legs from three different people were stitched together clumsily, without even a proper seam, and through the split skin red meat and white bone jutted out like things that did not belong. Worst of all were the three faces jammed crudely together in the center.
The eyes of those faces, foreheads and jaws crushed and fused into something misshapen, were twisted past recognition, brimming with the terror and despair they must have felt right up to the moment they died. It hurt just to look. No one could have believed that shape had ever been human. Even I hadn't understood, at first.
But the acne, and the wrinkles, were enough to say the shape had been human once. My head went ahead and pictured the rest on its own. How someone had turned a person into that.
"Hrrk—! Mmph, ghhk—!"
A hot, empty retch tore up out of me. I clamped a hand over my mouth and dropped to my knees, and there on the cold classroom floor I had to fight the urge to heave my guts out right then.
"You... motherfucking piece of shit...!"
It was a revolting photo. The kind that would have scared anyone. And just as hard as the nausea hit, rage climbed all the way to the top of my head, past the point where I could hold it.
"Hoo. Calm down."
Getting worked up was off-limits. Raging here wouldn't let me do a thing. There wasn't even anything to gain from it. Right now, I had to be calm. I checked the comments first.
The reaction was even warmer than I'd expected. Looking at it, the realization hit me late. The anomalies had been decent enough to me that I'd nearly felt a little friendly toward them, right up until a moment ago. In the end, they were nothing but anomaly bastards who killed humans.
Still. I didn't think they'd be this unbothered by a post like that.
He'd put up an image this repulsive, and the gallery didn't care? Shouldn't someone at least have cursed him out for not tagging it as gore?
Now that I think about it, there really wasn't a notice about nasty pics.
Apparently you could post them whenever you felt like it. And in that instant, one idea flashed through me.
"These bastards."
So gore pics were fair game, then? With my head full of rage, I wrote a post.
One anomaly, enjoying the gallery the way he always did. He went by the fixed handle DisguiseLover, and he was posting in his usual ordinary, cheerful way. Partly to help the newbie and partly to show off, he put his masterpiece up on the board.
But why isn't the newbie reacting?
Maybe he'd shown them something too shocking right from the start. It was hard to copy, he had to admit. He was just beginning to feel a little sorry.
The newbie had posted something new.
A method?
Did the newbie have a method of their own? Honestly, it would be lacking next to his. That was the thought he carried in with him as he went to look at the newbie's innocent little method, a smile tugging at his mouth for no good reason.
That was a mistake.
"GYAAAAAAAH!!!"
It wasn't a corpse. There wasn't a drop of blood. Even so, calling that image disgusting didn't begin to do it justice.
That day, for the first time, the anomaly screamed in terror. It was a photo that should never have been seen. A photo that must not be seen. And he had seen it.
"KYAAAAAAAH!!!"
Why does a grandma pic like that even exist in this world! Why is she naked?! In that pose?!?!
"HWAAAAAARGH!!!"
Every anomaly active on the gallery, for the first time, ran headlong into the pure and utterly despairing malice of a human being.