Spent the evening finishing the story. Will probably spend tomorrow not making it suck. You can read it on Patreon, once I’m done!
X-F started off by simply spoiling the game, but as he brawled online with a whole different set of outraged fans (including both the publishers and the Ech-Pi-El Appreciation Society, a horror-themed entertainment company who had provided most of the voice actors) the troll got fascinated by The Case. At first this meant that the flame-wars between him and his opponents got dialed back a bit as X-F started reading the base material — and then they got worse, as X-F started having opinions on what he was reading.
Fade was no stranger to horrible people saying horrible things online. Just like everybody else. But this was worse than a forum meltdown on abortion, religion, or movie remakes; it raged from the heights of Reddit to the depths of 4Chan, leaving locked threads and mass purges in its wake. And it was so esoteric. Cosmic horror stories were merely the starting point; within a month X-F was deep into the original hard stuff.
It startled Fade to see X-F’s badly-spelled Latin quotes from works like the Liber Ivonis or Daemonlorum, as her own status as a doctoral student in Medieval Metaphysics was barely enough to let her peruse tomes like those. Not that there was anything to any of those hoary old tomes, or indeed any other. They were just old books full of magical nonsense. And yet: once somebody read their first book from the Special Restricted Stacks at Fade’s university, they never again complained at how the librarians would stare unblinkingly at researchers until the precious tomes were handed back and secured in their specially-made individual boxes.
There was a lot to worry Fade, actually. As X-F kept ranting he sounded more and more like someone who had progressed from being able to read these texts somehow to someone who seemed to be actually trying out some of the things mentioned in the texts. Which should never ever happen! As her professors had been extremely careful to pound into her head, so many of those rituals violated animal cruelty laws, and even the ones that weren’t were still unsanitary and would not reflect well on the University. The idea that X-F would be so rude as to keep on with this demented form of practical, yet futile scholarship made Fade shudder. In a perfectly materialist and secular way.