Dark Explorations

Sofia and I watched a few episodes before I received a message from Alice. I politely excused myself to Sofia’s mild agitation. I promised to rejoin later tonight so we could continue. I insisted she didn’t need to wait for me, but she just shooed me off and decided to watch something else while she waited for me to rejoin. I went to my bedroom and opened my laptop to see the email of information that Alice sent while calling her. She answered instantly and gave her usual meek answer.

“H-hey Alan!”

“Hey Alice, so what did you find?”

Alice’s voice immediately picked up in tone and I could sense excitement from her. It caused her already squeaky high pitched volume to increase even more and mimic that of girls from overly exaggerated anime. It was kind of adorable.

“I found R-Roxane’s reddit account.”

I opened the email from the usual burner email and found a link along with the email used and the password to login to it.

“Holy shit, how much did she use it?”

“A lot, c-check it out.”

I opened the link to be greeted by a user named u/Screamgirly040105. The account was huge and had twenty thousand karma. The account was thoroughly customized with her avatar dressed in a Ghostface-looking mask and a polar opposite pink outfit. The account banner was an anime-style fanart of Ghostface and another girl dressed in a very Hello Kitty-esque pink outfit cuddling. The account was originally created in 2021, nearly five years old at this point.

“This is a goldmine. How did you find it?”

“It w-was actually easy. W-when I found her e-email, I went through it and f-found one from R-reddit. I c-could guess her p-password.

I clicked over to her emailed information and read out loud the password.

“040105. That’s Roxane’s birthday, isn’t it? April 1st 2005. The same numbers in the account name as well. Not great cybersecurity.”

“Y-yeah, it's not.”

I could only shake my head and laugh at my luck. A strong password was something most people didn’t have. I had one of course, I’ve read enough cybercrimes to know what a good one is. Most people can’t be bothered to care about making a complex mixture of numbers, letters, and special characters that they can remember. This was even more true of the fifteen year old that Roxane was when she created this account. I clicked back to the account and began to read its statistics. Active in forty different communities, ranging between multiple subjects. Many were themed around horror movies and video games; r/horror, r/scream, r/fivenightsatfreddys. Some gun and shooter video games; r/CallofDuty, r/guns, r/gunporn. Others were a sharp u-turn in aesthetic and seemed to be bright girly media in an otherwise dark home page; r/HelloKitty, r/mylittlepony, r/AnimalCrossing, r/danganronpa.

“Well this is definitely an interesting curation of communities.”

“Y-you haven’t even seen the c-crazy part. Look at the n-newest c-comment.”

I clicked over to the user’s comments and read the latest comment praising another user’s Animal Crossing fanart. It seems completely innocuous at first, until I read the data. Posted two weeks ago.

“Wait, she's still active?”

I heard her chuckle at my realization before responding with an auditory smile behind the word.

“Y-yep!”

I was in shock. Reddit was amazing because of its anonymous nature allowing users to more confidently post their honest opinions and explore unfiltered communities. The issue with Reddit and similar communities was the anonymity and the short life spans of accounts. If someone ever makes an unpopular opinion and gets called out, they simply make a new account. It’s easy to simply replace your identity on these kinds of social platforms. An account living and being actively maintained for five years is the holy grail of mapping out a person’s psychological development. The best part is this is an actively used account with more karma than any account I have ever found. Alice brings up one more fact I never even considered.

“I p-pulled the IP information for every time she p-posted. It’s p-pretty spread out and only used p-public wifi, though you can c-compare it with your map with S-Sofia.”

I was smiling so wide as she spoke. This was the type of information I could only dream of finding. Sofia’s accounts show us the territories where Roxane and enemy bases were. This information turns a list of data points into a clear way to track movement between. With this, we can both predict where the bases we don’t have are and use the most recent data by Roxane to find where she would be heading. Rather than marching through an empty forest taking hundreds of acres in space, we can simply go to the portion she most recently posted from.

“Alice, you just gave us exactly what we needed.

She took a second to respond before she spoke in a tone practically bubbling with joy.

“I-it was nothing. A p-pretty easy find. I’m just g-glad it’s useful.”

I leaned back in my chair and simply admired the account. I gave her account a follow and made a note to check regularly to see when she posts next. The next thing I did was begin scrolling. I needed to find a timeline of when she began to interact with these communities. She was fairly active on many firearm centered subreddits and began to post on them before she ever started posting to video game subreddits like Call of Duty. The great misconception about the development of violence among youths is the role that movies and video games play. Violent video games like Counterstrike, Battlefield and Roxane’s preference of Call of Duty have garnered a bad reputation by uninformed parents that they cause teen rebelliousness and a fixation on violence. Research has proven they actually do the exact opposite, they help relieve stress and anxiety in daily life giving both teens and adults a way to burn off unnecessary emotions.

My hypothesis is not universal and is just that, a theory I believe. It's true that many violent teens have played violent video games. That is simply because a majority of teens play video games in general and as such played at least a few violent video games. Even among top users of games rated mature or 13+ for violence, a correlation between violent individuals and violent video games and media does not exist provably. Despite the lack of a general correlation, there are multiple individual incidents of violent individuals playing video games and using those games as a form of escaping and malignant coping. My theory is that the proposal that video games create violence puts the cart before the horse. Violent video games and movies do not make violent individuals. Violent individuals seek out violent video games and movies as a form of stress relief from their malignant thoughts or inspiration for their twisted fantasies.

For the first six months of u/Screamgirly040105’s account, it seems she had a far simpler feed. Her main posts were all located on more innocent, traditionally girly, video games and shows with a few exceptions for some horror movies franchises. The Scream franchise appeared a few times early on and was likely the inspiration for her username. The first comments I found were on some very interesting posts. The majority of it was fanart or cosplay of the Scream movies, many of them explicit or euphemistic. She would express desire towards the art or actor to either be a female version of the Ghostface or be the original Ghostface’s victim. Over time, this shifted to include other many famous horror mascots; Jigsaw, Jason Vorhees, Michael Meyers, before finally moving towards more traditional discussions about the movies after a few months alongside the old comments.

It was around this time that she seemingly began to use the account for more than seeking semi-pornographic art. She began to discuss frequently on many firearm related servers as well expanding her video game selection to include more violent games. She asked questions about the legality of gun ownership, purchasing guns as a minor, many of these questions were ultimately removed by post moderators due to them asking about crimes. Her activity increased on these firearm servers after the Huntsville High School Shooting. She asked questions about maintaining different handguns and rifles as well as tips for using them. She even posted a few videos of her practicing with targets at long distances. Her face could never be seen, but her ability to hit a bullseye at a thousand yards with a Ruger American rifle was undoubtedly extremely impressive. I still question why it was painted pink and had a black bow tied around the muzzle though.