Tyler and the Strange Website

He wasn't particularly attracted to 'spooky themed' things; he just wanted to get off. He clicked a random ad from a latex TGP gallery he was looking at, something he knew better than to do since that's the kind of thing that gets a computer infected...

He wasn't typically prone to ads, but there was something compelling about it. The promo material had absolutely perfect women, with phrases like "Be dominated in ways you've never imagined!" and "Do you believe in magic?" If it was one of those typical monthly sites, what was the harm of giving them $20 just to see what was up?

When he hit the site link, the page load hung for some time. Suddenly, the entire UI was replaced by his screen glowing red.

"Shit, shit...I knew that was a bad idea!" He shouted, striking the Ctrl-Alt-Del chord over and over again. Nothing responded, and he knew pulling the laptop charging cord out wasn't going to help him. His battery was nearly full. He held in the power key, hoping to halt whatever damage was being done to its digital innards.

But he was also staring at the red glow, pulsing away. Short of smashing his laptop, which would be a total loss, apparently this thing was going to run its course. He hoped this was just a data-hostage worm and nothing that was going to ruin his life.

"Come on, come on, restart..." The screen shifted to an iridescent pattern, and Tyler blinked his eyes a couple of times, shaking his head. There were little flashes of light and momentary frames of patterns and symbols he couldn't really make out. "Wh-what the fuck is this crazy shit?"

He felt strange looking at it after a couple seconds--and the disorientation freaked him out. He slammed his laptop shut, looking at the eerie sliver of red light still spilling out over his desk from the closed laptop.

There was a brown out, some kind of power surge that his entire apartment reacted to. He looked around at the room as the lights dimmed and brightened before going out entirely. He was left for a few seconds with nothing but the red glow from the closed laptop.

In the darkened room, Tyler approached the laptop slowly. It was unplugged. The power outage couldn't have come from a hacker, right? That sounded like crazy movie-script shit. Just as he was about to open the laptop to see if anything had changed, the glow slowly faded from the closed top, and the lights in his apartment came back on.

He looked around to see that everything was back to normal--save his microwave now flashing 12:00AM--and when he flipped open the laptop, the red glow was gone. The website was back. The page he clicked before actually loaded.

There was a woman who looked like a sorceress, pointing directly at the screen and smiling. It was an evil-looking grin, and the woman's astonishing body was clad in exactly the kind of tight, curve-gripping shiny clothing Tyler wanted to see. Her perfect pale skin, crimson lips and long black hair belied a very convincing 'alt-girl' look...but her expression had something more to it. There was a weird, exciting power to it that Tyler chalked up to the coincidence of the power outage.

Hello there, my brave little ****... The caption next to her picture read. Be prepared to meet the power of your subconscious desires!

There was no "premium subscription" option. There were no galleries, no videos, no payment acceptance page. There was nowhere else to navigate to...just this landing page. He right-clicked and hit 'inspect' on the menu, wondering if there was something he missed.

Sure enough, the page header carried comments that weren't visible on the browser. There were several lines of text that Tyler couldn't recognize as words, complete with unpronounceable strings of consonants and oddly-placed apostrophes, but it was clear that they were meant to be placed there. The last line seemed to prove it:

Contracted by Baroness Giavanna, servant of Empress Graciela.

And there was nothing else. He closed the underlying code again, looking at the weird page. No ads? No teasers other than the picture in front of him? There was something else to this site, and he wasn't sure what it was. The perfectly-timed power surge freaked him out a little. He walked away from his computer to take a piss and regroup. He left the page up.

When he was washing his hands in the bathroom, he noticed something else. Something he couldn't put his finger on. It almost felt like he was being watched...or at least that there was a presence, an energy in his apartment. When he came back into his living room, he froze at the sight of his laptop screen. It was a different picture of the same woman, but this time she had a latex-gloved hand raised to her mouth. Her half opened-eyes and the smile she was half-hiding seeming to be frozen in a laugh directed at him.

The caption was different too.

You don't need to cooperate to please your Baroness, the caption said. I want to see you fight against your desires, my pet. The more slowly you accept what's happening to you, the sweeter your surrender will be.

"What the fuck," Tyler finally said aloud. He took a last look at the woman in the picture, studying her expression and her body once more before shaking his head and closing the window. "Maybe it's, uh...time to lay off this stuff for a while." He threw on a pair of sweatpants and headed out to his living room couch to play some video games.

As soon as he was out of his room, his laptop glitched again, the screen flickering before it bathed the room in a red hue again. After a few moments, there was motion in Tyler's room. His closet door opened slowly as two of his dresser drawers began to slide out on their own...