They called him Strange.
Not like a nickname. Not like a joke. Just… Strange.
He didn't laugh when they said it. He didn't correct them either. He accepted it the way you accept gravity—unseen, constant, and always pulling.
Strange was that kid in the back of the classroom who talked to himself under his breath. Not muttering, not stammering—conversing. Full-blown arguments. Debates. Lectures. Sometimes, he'd win. Sometimes, he'd lose. But always, he'd be talking. To no one they could see.
No one else sat by him after the first week of school.
He answered questions no one asked. He wrote essays with handwriting that switched style halfway through. Teachers suspected he was messing with them, but Strange just blinked and said, "We disagreed on the tone."
Strange liked mirrors. Not because he liked himself. He didn't smile at his reflection. He didn't flex or pose. He watched it. Studied the way it blinked just a fraction too slow, the way its smile twitched differently than his muscles remembered. He tested it, whispered to it, waited.
Sheridan thought the mirrors were lying.
Von wanted to break them.
⸻
Strange wasn't alone in his head. He was two.
Von Crankenstein was the loud one. A cackling, reckless genius obsessed with anatomy, decay, the raw machinery of living things. His ideas were jagged and fast, more instinct than thought.
Sheridan Hollow was quieter. Sharper. He liked emotions the way a coroner liked cadavers: cold, laid out, labeled. Sheridan was the one who remembered every cruel word ever spoken to them. Not because it hurt—but because it was data.
Doctors called it dissociative identity disorder.
Kids called it creepy.
So they stopped calling him anything at all.
By freshman year, Strange had no friends, no partners for group projects, no team invites. He was a ghost in the hallway. Not hated. Just… avoided. As if by instinct, like animals avoiding the sick.
He stopped trying to join the world.
And the world didn't miss him when he left.
⸻
It started with nights online. Just curiosity at first. Strange had a hunger—not for connection, but for answers. The surface web bored him. Tutorials, clickbait, social games—they weren't real. Everyone was playing a part.
So he went deeper.
And deeper.
There, in the forgotten layers of the net, they found reality. Brutal. Uncensored. And alive.
While other kids watched gamers and influencers, Strange watched silent camera feeds in basements, forest rituals ending in screams, livestreams that ended mid-breath.
Sheridan took notes.
Von got ideas.
Eventually, watching wasn't enough.
The first victim was a runaway. No one would miss him, they said.
It was messy. Sheridan underestimated the blood loss curve. Von overestimated bone flexibility.
But it was a start.
They cleaned up. Improved. Learned.
By the third, they were efficient. Quiet. Surgical.
They didn't kill for hate. Or rage. Or pleasure.
They killed to learn.
⸻
They were seventeen and monsters already.
But monsters no one believed in.
Not yet.
Not until the Net blinked back.
Not until the game invited them in.
Not until the shadows whispered:
"You are not alone."
Strange wasn't expecting a birthday present.
He didn't have family to give one. He didn't have friends to remember. The school counselor hadn't even remembered his name, much less the date on his file. Seventeen rolled into eighteen like a scalpel sliding into flesh—quiet, cold, and inevitable.
That night, Strange didn't blow out candles.
He built a tracking algorithm.
It was Sheridan's idea. He believed that there were places online—living places—nestled in the folds of the dark web like tumors no one could cut out. Glitches that weren't bugs. Patterns that weren't random. Von thought it was fun—like hunting ghosts with a shotgun.
It began like any other dive. Layer by layer. Firewall after firewall. Encryption, cloaking, onion routes. A symphony of black code and silence.
Then—
Blink.
The screen fuzzed.
"Do you wish to continue?"
Y/N
That wasn't code. That was… interface.
Strange tilted his head. Neither Sheridan nor Von recognized the sequence. The prompt didn't trace to a file. It wasn't being sent from anywhere. It was just… there.
He pressed Y.
⸻
What followed wasn't data.
It was a place.
A page rendered in shifting symbols, made of bones and blinking eyes. HTML sewn with sinew. A title in letters that shimmered like heatstroke:
"The Paranormal Net."
Beneath it: a school logo, jagged and blood-red.
Deadman's College of Arcane Horrors
Est. ???
"Learn. Devour. Ascend."
Von laughed out loud. "This has to be a joke."
Sheridan disagreed. "This is bait. Intelligence masked as idiocy. It's watching us."
Then, a second prompt blinked to life:
"APPLY NOW?"
Medico Strange
That name hadn't been entered. They hadn't typed anything.
The system knew.
Strange stared for a moment.
Then he clicked.
⸻
The next day, the letter arrived.
Not an email. Not a PDF.
A real envelope. Bone-colored parchment sealed with black wax, pressed with a skull sigil. No stamp. No return address.
Inside: acceptance papers. Class listings. A map that showed a campus he'd never heard of, in a town that didn't exist.
Orientation: One Week.
Transportation: Handled.
Dress code: None. Assume form.
Von squealed. Sheridan swore. Strange smiled.
This wasn't a game.
This was an invitation.
⸻
The bus wasn't a bus.
It looked like one from the outside—rusty, with one cracked headlight and the scent of rot wafting from the vents—but it moved wrong. Too smooth. Too silent.
Strange stepped aboard alone. The driver didn't speak. He didn't blink either.
Just drove.
The windows fogged black halfway through the ride. Time unraveled. Strange checked his watch and found it ticking backward.
Von hummed a tune he'd never heard. Sheridan counted heartbeats.
When the door finally opened again, they had arrived.
⸻
Deadman's College of Arcane Horrors stood like a fever dream stitched into a forest that shouldn't exist. Towers bent at wrong angles. Trees pulsed with something that resembled veins. The air was too sharp, too cold, too aware.
Students walked the grounds in every shape imaginable.
A boy with horns curled like question marks.
A girl made of glass.
A centaur carrying a flame-haired banshee on his back, arguing over who got to pick electives.
They were all monsters.
Real ones.
Not masks. Not costumes. Not cursed avatars in some online roleplay.
And in the middle of it all walked Strange.
Human.
Too human.
Perfectly human.
And everyone noticed.
⸻
He stepped into orientation with his posture too upright, skin too flawless, breath too measured.
A shapeshifter whispered, "What's that supposed to be?"
A lich muttered, "Is that his monster form?"
A troll laughed. "No way. That's a disguise. Nobody's that clean."
But they were wrong.
That wasn't a disguise.
That was his true form.
And behind his eyes, Sheridan was already scanning the crowd.
Von was picking targets.
They didn't come here to blend in.
They came to study.
Because every monster had something he wanted.
And Strange wasn't here to learn how to be like them.
He was here to build something better.