I am the monster you created

“You… who are you?” Sylvia was stunned by the presence of this creepy girl, and that was saying quite a lot, because Sylvia had a high tolerance for creepy girls.

“Shishishishi!” The only sound that reached Sylvia’s ears was the girl’s crazed laughter and the “Shing!” of her scissors snipping open and closed.

Sylvia wasn’t scared by a lot. Growing up on this island with little context for human vulnerability and weakness would kind of do that. But she was scared right now. She couldn’t think of another word to describe what she was feeling.

“Le-leave her alone!” Holly cried, running towards the two of them. She flung herself forward, sending her tiny body crashing into the stringy-haired girl, knocking her off of her feet. The girl was so startled by the sudden bit of contact that she dropped her scissors- the rusty weapon glittered as it clattered away into the darkness.

But Holly’s triumph was short-lived. Because a second later the blonde was on her feet again, and hoisted her up by the throat, holding her aloft with fury in her eyes.

“You’re in THE WAY!” She shouted at the top of her lungs, flinging Holly to the ground next to Sylvia. “I’m TRYING to talk to SYLVIA!”

She turned in the direction her scissors had fallen, only to see them pointed right at her.

Held in Vivian’s trembling hands.

“Back off!” Vivian shouted, her face flushed with courage even as obviously frightened as she was. “Don’t… don’t make me use these!” She didn’t even know if the scissors would hurt this girl, or if she was under the same rules they were. She didn’t even know who this girl was!

But she knew that she was scared, and it wasn’t just because the corridor was filled with shadows.

“Shishishishi… how rude… everyone keeps getting in my way,” Lynette snarled, her face smiling but her eyes flashing with anger. “So mean, so mean, so MEAN!”

She snapped her fingers and suddenly the hallway exploded with light. Vivian recoiled in surprise, shielding her eyes, and giving Lynette the opportunity she needed. She charged forward and yanked her scissors from the other woman’s hand, and then swung them right at Vivian’s stomach. It was only thanks to the heiress’s quick reflexes that she was able to evade the swing, and in doing so, she landed on the as well, falling flat on her ass.

“Playtime is over!” Lynette shouted, waving her scissors at the three girls. “Now you’re all going to come with me to my tea party! And if you try and resist-”

“A tea party?” Vivian sat upright in a flash. “Well, why didn’t you say so? I love tea parties!”

Lynette blinked. She cocked her head to the side and snapped her scissors closed. “Eh? Eh? EH?”

“You guys want to go to the tea party too, don’t you, girls?” Vivian asked quickly, looking at Holly and Sylvia. Her eyes were smoldering with aggression that left both of them momentarily frozen.

“…Uh… …Y-yeah! I’d love to go to your tea party!” Holly stammered, forcing herself to smile. “That sounds like so much fun, right, Sylvia?”

Lynette turned her gaze towards Sylvia now, giving her a look filled with suspicion. Maybe she could believe those two, but Sylvia?

“…Yuuuup…” Sylvia squeaked out, trembling. “You know me, my girls… always… love a good tea party… hehe…”

She gulped. Loudly.

Lynette scrunched up her face and stepped forward, leaning down and getting in close, close enough that Sylvia could smell the mildew on her dress.

“Really?” She asked. “You really want to come to my tea party? Really, really, really?”

“R-really really,” Sylvia nodded shakily.

Lynette’s smile immediately returned. “Oh how wonderful!” She cheered, lowering her scissors. “I thought we wouldn’t get along, but you’re actually nice! I’m so glad! Shishishishi! If you DIDN’T want to come, I’d have to stab you and put you to sleep! Glad I don’t need to do that now, shishishishi! Shishishishi!”

“Yeah…” Sylvia tried to laugh herself. “I’m glad too… yay…”

Holly glanced warily at Vivian, already convinced this was a bad plan that the heiress had reflexively cooked up. But it was too late to do anything about it now. The three of them were no match for this girl. She was violent, and unstable, and had complete control over this “dollhouse” of hers.

But part of that instability had given them something to latch onto. If they could get on (and more importantly, stay on) her good side… maybe they could get out of this.

“The others will be so happy to see you!” Lynette gushed, eyes shining with glee. “You’re the guest of honor, Sylvia!”

Sylvia could just nod, and try not to look absolutely freaked out.

Nick had had about enough of this. “You know what?” He snapped, rising to his feet, “I’m done. I’m done with all of this crap!”

“Nick!” Mary gasped, going pale.

Dakota shot him a warning look. But she held her tongue, knowing nothing she could say would help anyone.

“Oh?” Mr. S looked at Nick with an appraising gaze. Or at least, that’s what Nick took his expression as. It was hard to tell, because his face was impossible to get a grasp on. Like there was a mental block inhibiting the recognition part of his brain.

That was the least of his concerns.

“You made me sit here and watch as the people I care about have been taken away by this crazy… dollhouse one after another!” Nick shouted, storming over to the producer’s throne. “I’m done! You hear me?! It’s over! I’m not gonna be a part of this stupid show anymore, if it’s going to endanger the people I love!”

Mary nodded in approval, but her face was still tense with anxiety.

In contrast to Mr. S, who was cool as a cucumber.

“I assure you, they’re in no danger. That girl has specific instructions that she is not to harm anyone,” Mr. S swore.

Nick narrowed his eyes. “Like I could believe that,” he growled, balling up his hands into fists. “You derailed the whole challenge, and for what? To mess with Dakota?!”

“To teach her a lesson,” Mr. S said coldly. He shifted in his chair and the entire atmosphere on the stage changed. “My dear Dakota… my masterpiece… do you have any idea how much time I invested in her, boy? How hard I’ve worked? She was my greatest creation. The host chosen to succeed me. But now look at her. A pathetic loser so caught up in her feelings that she can’t even do her job right. You have no way of knowing this, Nicholas Reynolds, but a master standing up in defense of a season’s host? That’s downright humiliating.”

Dakota’s eyes dimmed. She bit her lip and clutched her cane tightly.

“So that’s all this is?” Nick shook his head. “You were never giving Dakota a chance at all, were you? This whole thing was just a setup to torment her.”

“Not at all!” Mr. S steepled his fingers together and leaned back in his seat. “I assure you, I have no desire to replace Dakota as the host of this show. Not after all I’ve invested in her. But… she has to learn that actions have consequences. I fully support her feelings for you, young man- it’s why you were chosen as the master in the first place! But those feelings are meant to stoke tension and drama. If this just turns into some sappy love story, well… I won’t have that. Harem Hotel needs drama. Stakes. Ambition. We can’t just churn out episode after episode of romcom slop and call it a day, out of the question!”

He shook his head and tapped his finger on the arm of his chair. “No… that’s why I chose to step in now, before the problem got too severe. I wanted to remind Dakota just what kind of person she is. Even if I need to be a little heavyhanded about it.”

“And what exactly does that mean?” Dakota demanded, finding her voice again. “How does messing around with my challenge remind me of… anything!?”

Mr. S looked at her and her blood ran cold. “…Because of who is doing the messing, of course,” he said, snapping his fingers.

And just like that, Dakota’s perception exploded. Suddenly, everything that had been kept from her throughout this challenge flooded into her mind. She could immediately sense every last corner of the maze again, including the areas that had been consumed by the dollhouse. And when she did, she finally saw who it was behind all this mystery and horror.

Her heart sank into her chest and her eyes widened in disbelief as the screen shifted to show the tea party in full swing, with Sylvia and the rest bound in chains around the pastel pink table.

“Who is that?” Mary gasped in confusion.

“It can’t be…” Dakota shook her head slowly. Her brain wasn’t processing what she saw because she couldn’t accept it. “Ly… Lynette…?”

Nick snapped his gaze towards Dakota in shock. “Lynette?!” He exclaimed. “You mean… Lynette, your doll when we were kids?!”

“That… that’s her…” Dakota would recognize that dress anywhere. The one she’d learned how to sew just to repair, no matter how clumsily she’d done so. It didn’t matter that she looked grungy now, or human.

She was Lynette and Dakota knew her immediately.

“How is that possible?” Mary asked, too overwhelmed to even bother thinking about the absurdity of that question. “Your doll? But she’s a girl?”

“Little Lynette,” Mr. S said, sneering with glee. “Dakota’s favorite toy growing up. A birthday gift from your mother. The one and only thing she ever bought for you. On that ‘perfect day’ of yours, do you remember?”

Dakota trembled like a leaf. Tears welled up in her eyes, but she couldn’t shed them. That would just be admitting her weakness in front of the producer.

“And then… you threw her away…” Mr. S leaned down and hissed in Dakota’s ear. “Your own child… just like Sylvia.”

“N-no, I-I didn’t!” Dakota pulled back, stumbling and falling on her ass. Her cane skittered away, landing at Nick’s feet. “And… and even if I did… she-she was just a doll! You can’t blame me for that!”

“But she wasn’t just a doll to you, was she?” Mr. S countered. “To you, she was the real thing. Your child. And how did you treat her, again? Do you remember? All the horrible things you did to her? How you abused her?”

“I-!” Dakota wished she could say something in her defense. But she couldn’t.

“Because that’s who you are,” Mr. S sneered. “Someone who only cares about herself.”

“Let’s get introductions out of the way!” Lynette declared cheerfully, looking around at her tied up “guests”.

“Yeah, let’s,” Kim muttered under her breath. Forget the absurdity of this “tea party”, they all knew each other already!

Lynette ignored her. “I’m Little Lynette! But you can just call me Lynette! I’m a doll made just for you, to be your absolute best friend and your own perfect daughter! That’s what the box says! But, I’m Mommy’s daughter! My Mommy…”

She swooned. Then her dazed look of whimsy turned sour and she swung her scissors. “But… Mommy was very mean! Very, very, very mean!” She wailed.

Vivian had to duck to avoid the scissors clipping her in the face. Not an easy task when you were tied to a chair.

“Dakota loved that doll,” Amelia murmured. That she remembered clearly enough.

“She did! When we met, it was love at first sight, Mommy and I!” Lynette firmly asserted. “I was her whole world! It was just me and Mommy! …Oh, and that Nick guy, too, but Mommy always loved me better than him.”

The girls shared hesitant glances with one another. Not one person there believed that was true.

“Mommy did so much for me,” Lynette swooned. “She would brush my hair… read me stories… patch up my dress when it got ripped and torn… …But then, Mommy was the one who would rip it in the first place.”

A shadow crossed over the girl’s face as her smile faded away, replaced with a nasty snarl.

She snapped her scissors open and shut.

“Mommy… Mommy… …Mommy!” She growled, waving the scissors around angrily. “Always getting mad at me, always blaming ME for everything! It wasn’t my fault, not Lynette’s fault-! Lynette didn’t do anything bad, it was MOMMY!”

She pulled at her stringy hair furiously with one hand while thrashing her scissors with the other. The girls all tried to sink down into their seats, none of them wanting to be cut by the crazy girl’s frenzied ****.

“What is she talking about?” Holly hissed, stilling having trouble wrapping her brain around the idea of an animated doll, even after she’d been given all the details.

“I don’t know!” Gina hissed back. “That was before my time!”

“Little Lynette…” Amelia bit her lip, looking sadly at the furious doll. “What Dakota did to you… that was wrong.”

Lynette settled down. She looked at Amelia, her face lit with amazement. “Oh my gosh… you DO get it, don’t you? Don’t you!?”

No one else at the table had an inkling of what Amelia supposedly “got” but at least she wasn’t waving those scissors around anymore.

“It wasn’t FAIR!” Lynette exclaimed, stomping her foot. “Lynette was always blamed for EVERYTHING! ‘I didn’t eat the cookies, it was Lynette!’ ‘Lynette told me it was okay to play in the mud!’ ‘Lynette said that, not me!’ but I didn’t do ANY of that! I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t!”

The crazy girl broke down into furious howls, digging her cracked nails into the surface of the table. “I just loved Mommy, that was all… but Mommy… Mommy always blamed me, even when SHE was doing all the bad things-! And when she got punished, she took it out on ME! It’s not fair…”

She backed away, and to everyone’s shock… tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“I used to have such a pretty dress,” Lynette sniffled, holding up the frayed hem of her dress. “But when Mommy got grounded because her mom didn’t believe her, she tore it up! Why!? It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t! And even though she repaired it every time, it wasn’t the same-! She’d yell at me, throw me around the room, call me a dummy and say it was MY fault, all MY fault… I… I just wanted… I just wanted Mommy to love me always… but she would get so angry and…!”

“Lynette…” Tears welled up in Sylvia’s eyes as she looked at the broken girl in front of her.

No one knew what to say in that moment. No matter what they thought about the crazed scissor-wielding girl, it was tough to watch her break down like this. No one could bring themselves to say anything.

…Well, Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin wasn’t that moved. But she couldn’t say anything anyway.

Lynette took a deep breath, clutching her scissors tightly. Slowly that cracked, jagged smile of hers stretched its way back across her lips.

“But… now I’m different,” she said proudly. “Now I’m human, like Mommy. And Mommy… she won’t be able to hurt me ever again. Now it’s MY turn to show Mommy how much I love her, by hurting her right back! And then we’ll be happy again like we used to be! Shishishishi!”

Yeah. Everyone knew that this… doll-girl… was absolutely fucking out of her mind.

“I’m sorry…” Sylvia whimpered, tears rolling down her cheeks. She doubted Lynette wanted any sympathy from her, but she couldn’t help herself. “That must have been so hard for you… Lynette… getting treated like that…”

“What would you know!?” Lynette roared, turning her scissors on Sylvia. The sorrow in her expression was replaced with rage. “You… you’re just the FAKE! Mommy doesn’t love you like she loved me! But she kept YOU around! It’s not fair!”

“No, that-!” Sylvia was only just now realizing that she was talking to the closest thing she had to a sister. “Lynette, that’s not how it is at all!”

“Yeah, Dakota treats her like crap,” Kim blurted out.

Lynette blinked. She lowered her scissors. “…She does?”

Sylvia winced. “No, it-”

She felt Holly’s foot kick her in the shin, and shut her mouth.

“I… she… she wasn’t… a mom for me…” Sylvia admitted, remembering all the painful times she’d experienced growing up. “She didn’t care about me… she didn’t… she…”

“She didn’t read you bedtime stories?” Lynette asked, leaning closer, studying Sylvia intently. “Or brush your hair?”

“S-sometimes,” Sylvia stammered, unable to lie in the face of that piercing gaze. “But she didn’t usually bother.”

“Did she fix your clothes?” Lynette asked.

Sylvia shook her head.

A look of triumph crossed the doll-girl’s face.

“Shishishishi! Mommy doesn’t love you at all, then, does she?” Lynette cackled, pinching Sylvia’s cheek. “Not like me! She loves ME the most!”

Her joy went as quickly as it came.

“…But then, she KEPT you,” Lynette growled, narrowing her eyes. “She didn’t throw YOU away.”

“That wasn’t what happened,” Amelia objected. “Dakota… she did not throw you away. It was her mother who did that.”

Amelia looked down, frowning. “I heard her once… she talked about how gross it was that Dakota was still playing with you, when you looked so filthy. How people were starting to talk. So she threw you away when her daughter was at school.”

Kim’s heart trembled with rage when she heard that.

“How horrible…” Vivian shook her head in disbelief.

“I know it wasn’t her-!” Tears welled up in Lynette’s eyes. “But it was still her FAULT! If she had taken better care of me, I wouldn’t have ended up looking like this! I wouldn’t have gotten thrown away! Mommy may not have done it, but that doesn’t make what she did to me better!”

“Look, this might sound awful, but you were a doll,” Vivian pointed out. “Wasn’t she just a little girl taking out her frustration on a toy?”

“Yeah,” Lynette spat, glaring muddily at Vivian. “On me.”

How reasonable Lynette’s grudge actually was could be up for debate. The idea that Dakota should be condemned for treating a toy like that was hard for all of them to sit with, even if the toy was standing right in front of them.

“If… if Dakota knew you were alive, then, I’m sure she wouldn’t…” Gina’s voice trailed off as her eyes met Sylvia’s. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t. But it wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind.

“She thought I was alive,” Lynette spat. “And she did it anyway. Even though she loved me, said we were best friends one day, that I was her daughter the next, talking about how much she cared… and yet, and yet, and yet, what about Lynette? Tossed in the garbage like the trash I was, and then she decided to forget!?”

“That isn’t what happened at all!” Amelia exclaimed. “That girl was inconsolable when she thought she lost you, Lynette! She cried on my lap for days after it happened, and she barely even knew me! I was just Nicholas’s new stepmother, and suddenly I had to care for a child who was broken up, as if her OWN child had died!”

No one could imagine what that must have been like. No one.

Amelia fought back the urge to cry herself. She wasn’t that sort of woman. “That pain… isn’t that proof that she missed you? That’s why I bought her another doll… another Little Lynette, I thought… I thought it would fill the hole in her heart-”

“A replacement!” Lynette howled, stabbing her scissors into the table so hard the impact knocked over some of the cups. “A replacement for me, her DAUGHTER!”

“But Dakota never saw it that way,” Amelia pointed out. “There was no replacement for you, Lynette.”

“That’s right,” Gina murmured. “That’s why she never brought that doll to camp with her, why I never saw it. Dakota… she didn’t think it was that special, did she?”

Amelia shook her head. “She didn’t love that doll. It was just a toy. Some empty, hollow replacement for the one she’d lost. The doll she painstakingly mended the clothing of, and cared for even as you became worn out and dirty. YOU were what was important to her, Lynette. ONLY you.”

Lynette trembled with rage and sorrow. Tears burned in her furious eyes as a smile twisted her face right in two.

“And that makes up… for how she treated me? She gets to ruin my dress, hurt me like that, but it’s okay because she kissed it and made it better!?”

“I don’t get it!” Sylvia blurted out, unable to hold back her feelings anymore. “You don’t have to make the case to me that Dakota was an awful mother, Lynette! You don’t! I get it, I went through that too! Okay?! You think I had it easy? She fucking tried to **** me! Because she didn’t think I was real! You’re crying about a torn dress and a few bumps?! Dakota didn’t think I was alive either, and tried to erase me from existence!”

The room fell silent. Lynette stared at Sylvia for a long time, an unreadable expression on her blank face. She stood so still, it was almost like she really WAS a doll.

Then she smiled.

“Shishishishi… I see… so in the end… Mommy really did love me more than you… …Shishishishi!” She cradled her cheeks and trembled in delight, her eyes sparkling as she gazed triumphantly down at a stunned Sylvia.

In that moment Sylvia knew- this girl was likely too far gone to be helped at this point.