Recording has begun

It's Thursday, November twenty seventh, two thousand thirty one. Thanksgiving.

I'm making this for the record, if there ever is one. If you happen to be listening to this, then you're either the bastard that offed me, or you're a cop trying to crack my case. If you're somehow neither of those, and happen to be some little shit that got a hold of this, let me just tell you to destroy this recording while you still have that chance.

I'm an overnight millionaire. Yeah, that's right. I won the lottery. Roughly... What, five years go? Something like that. Point is, I became rich very quickly, and very publicly.

Now, you might think that's not such a bad thing. Most folks who get that kind of money blow it all in a year or two and then have to go back to living normal lives, except now they're having a hard time managing to do that with all the luxuries they bought.

However, some people try to hold on to the money they get. Some invest it. Some put it in the bank. Others bury it out back under a shed. Those are the easy targets for anyone running around in the black market. Now don't get me wrong, they don't always get hit, but sometimes... They do. Nasty things happen at that point. Torture, kidnapping, murder, theft, blackmail. It all comes back to bite them in the end.

There's also a select few who try to avoid that scenario. These people change their names, their faces, their whole identities in an attempt to run away. They leave behind everyone and everything they ever knew. Some of those few try to help their families disappear. Some don't.

I know I didn't. You might think that's callous of me, but nobody can say I didn't try. They didn't want to disappear, which in all honesty is pretty fair. I didn't want to leave my life either, but the money was more than enough to solve everything. So that's what I did as my last act. I solved all their problems for them. Medical bills, housing, food, clothing. I made sure they'd have enough to live the rest of their lives in comfort.

Thinking about it now, I do miss them. They're probably all sitting around the table right now, having turkey, rice, stuffing, mashed potatoes with gravy, and that dry as hell ham that was never cooked right... Fuck, I miss that ham. We would joke about it for a solid ten minutes while that god awful christmas movie played in the background, and the dogs would sit at our feet begging for even a few small scraps in that way dogs did.

Anyways, as a lottery winner who decided to disappear, let me just say right now that if someone ever finds you, under no circumstances are you to ever hesitate to kill them, and you must always carry a gun on you, and it absolutely must be loaded at all times.

It was about two years ago. I had a nice house on the edge of some suburbs, I won't say where, but it was in a place where nobody would bother me unless it was truly necessary. I was relaxing in my favorite recliner, an old beat up wreck of a thing, the cloth padding slowly coming off of the armrests, when someone rang my doorbell. It was in the early evening before the sun set, so I figured it must've been some door to door salesman, since they're the only ones willing to show up at any hour of the day, at just about every house in the suburb. Naturally, I felt safe enough so I didn't bother grabbing any of the guns I'd stashed all over the house, all of them hidden away in concealed panels on the walls. After all, how much trouble could one person be?

If only I had fucking known, I would've just shot a .44 caliber round straight through the door. I had only just started opening it when it got kicked aside, and I was tackled to the ground, a rag shoved in my face, and I blacked out. Can you guess what happened next? No? How about I tell you all the gruesome details?

That I woke up in my own basement, strapped down to my own kitchen table while some asshole in a ski mask sat just a few feet away?

That when I woke up he started asking where I'd put the money, where I'd been hiding the safe full of cash?

What about exactly what torture feels like?

I can tell you now that he wasn't a big guy. Maybe five foot something, a bit taller than me. Skinny, but not anorexic skinny. More like the skinny that doesn't ever get fat no matter how much they eat. Twitchy bastard too, like he was scared of or angry at every damn shadow on the walls. I could never tell, and don't care to think about it nowadays.

When it was clear I wouldn't talk, he started bringing out the tools. A drill, pliers, bolt cutters, bandages, adrenaline, a full fucking hospital set to make sure I wouldn't die. Most of the things I saw him set up were likely for intimidation, since his favorite toy was a big ass sledgehammer. Said that the pain from having my bones broken, my muscles ripped apart, and blood spurting out through my legs was so much sweeter when the pain began to fade, only to ramp back up when another hit came.

Problem with all this was, I had already been hurt enough in the past that I knew I wouldn't break from that particular brand of torture. Pain was already an old friend of mine by the time I was twenty. He didn't know this though, so instead of my will breaking, what broke were my legs in several places. He seemed to prefer my right leg, as he busted that one up the most, shattering it almost entirely. He didn't get caught only because he had stuffed a gag in my mouth to muffle the sounds of me screaming.

I should've died from shock, though I guess I'm just built to endure pain, so instead I managed to muddle my way through hours of torture, only occasionally blacking out.

He got tired of hitting me after awhile, so I guess he decided to take a nap in my bedroom. After all, what could a cripple do? I wasn't going anywhere, was I? Not with my legs broken so bad that even a slight twitch sent agony ripping up my spine and into my brain.

But as I said before, pain is an old friend. He also took the gag out so I could breathe while he slept. Probably thought I wouldn't try calling for help. He was right of course, but wrong about me doing nothing. I spent half an hour shimmying my way down to a point where I could chew through the first strap which was the only thing holding my shoulders down. Each second of this laborious process, the nerves in my legs screamed at me to stop moving, to stop doing anything.

I got through the first strap, forced myself back inch by inch, and ended up getting my arms free. Took me a good five minutes after that to get myself fully free, broken bones and all. My legs were destroyed to hell and back, but I managed to flop onto the basement floor with only half a yelp, teeth gritting so hard they ached. I dragged myself up the basement stairs, over to the nearest hidden gun I could find, and into my bedroom on the second floor. I was only moving at that point through instinct, adrenaline, and more rage than I'd had in years. Hell of an anesthetic, but not very good for thinking.

He never heard me sliding my way along hardwood floors, into the room, right up next to his sleeping body. He also didn't hear me empty the entire magazine into his corpse. The neighbors sure did, though.

When the police finally arrived, they found me sitting in the bedroom against the wall with my legs bent the wrong way in three different places, while the asshole himself was still in my bed, his blood staining the sheets crimson. My gun was empty at that point, but I'd grabbed a pocket pistol from behind the night stand just in case.

I ended up being taken to a hospital, though I ended up losing my gun after they cut my pants off in order to get a look at my legs, which actually made one of the attending nurses faint. I was high on painkillers at that point, so I laughed for a full minute at that. Twisted sense of humor, I know.

By then they had decided to put me in a medically induced coma while they worked on my legs. Granted, I wouldn't let them do anything to make me lose consciousness until they promised to have three people monitoring me twenty four hours a day. I didn't really feel like waking up only to restart the torture, and they had a hard time arguing with the guy who was borderline feral.

Cutting that story short, they saved my entire left leg which I considered a goddamn miracle, but I lost my right leg below the knee. Ended up getting a prosthetic for it, and didn't stay in the area for too long after the fact. Changed my name again, my address, the whole nine yards.

I can tell that my personality has shifted because of that along with everything else, to a point that I'm not always certain of who I am. That's why I'm going to step into a VR pod. In case you don't know what that is, a neurologist had a breakthrough in researching the human brain, and medicine could finally treat mental illness somewhat more effectively, though they couldn't fix me. Trust me, I checked.

This breakthrough also ended up indirectly benefitting the VR gaming sector. They built the pods to help regulate bodily functions while immersed, while the helmet was developed to tap into your brain and intercept the signals sent to your body. That's the best explanation I have for it, at least.

The game I'm going into is supposedly an apocalyptic one. Dynamic, player influenced, and very few safety nets for those unable to keep themselves alive. Apparently it's also got some of the best npc's the world has ever seen. At least, that's what I heard when I visited a grocery store a few months ago. The game released just yesterday, and I got my hands on a copy.

I'm thinking about adopting a personality while I'm in there. Not roleplay, specifically. More... Something to help me solidify what's left of myself. I'm looking forward to trying it out to be honest. I'm wondering, though... WIll I become someone I don't hate every time I look in the mirror, or will I just be lost entirely? No idea. I'll be recording every moment I'm in there, just in case I need to see myself through different eyes. After all, I can't just go to a therapist and tell them I had a shitty childhood, won the lottery, got turtured, had to murder another three people after that who tried to do the same, and that I'm now a paranoid wreck that'll resort to my old violent tendencies at the drop of a hat. Might not go very well.

On a more serious note, if you're listening to this, and I hurt someone and appeared on the news... I'm sorry. That means I failed to become someone better. If that doesn't happen, and I don't get shot in the next few years, I think I'll just try to enjoy living... For a little while, at least... End recording.