my annoyingly specific creepypasta headcannons
Chapter 3: Ben / BEN DROWNED

Originally written 19 October 2024

(note: this fic is also up on AO3.)

Notes:
Ben is one of the more lore-complex characters considered to be a classic crpa, as he comes from a long-running ARG rather than one story. In the context of my writing, I’m describing the person named Ben, as the name BEN describes the AI network composed of several unknown dead children (which Ben was previously apart of). This is one of the longest lists I’ve made, because most of it is compensating for lack of canon lore background. As always, there is some intentional divergence from canon and I’ve pretty much completely ignored fanon interpretations. (most of this will not make sense if you’re not familiar with the ARG or only familiar with fanon, sorry!)

• Prior to his death, he was an impoverished kid from an Evangelical background who regularly moved to different relatives’ homes to outrun truancy laws and escape the neglect of his parents, who simply weren’t at home most of the time. His family was not particularly religious in practice, but often used religiously-imbued threats of violence for any reason they wanted, ie. to get him to go to school, force an undue apology out of him, force him to eat or not eat, etc. The threat of going to hell was the main motivator in his life to get anything done.
• his family went to the kind of white people church where the pastor’s cadence is stuck in permanent performing-an-exorcism mode and all he talks about is how poor people are gonna go to hell. Ben made a habit of fully dissociating anytime he had to go, which became an automatic response to anything that upset him.
• he skipped as many days of school as he could get away with, from the time he was 8 up until he died. Obviously he was bullied, born in a wet cardboard box all alone etc etc.. He was generally excluded by his peers, occasionally had what few cool trinkets he owned stolen from his backpack, and didn’t trust anyone enough to really have friends or ask questions. He didn’t do well academically, which he was punished for by being in detention much of the time, and the only way he knew how to answer to his family was by repenting and promising he “really really [did] want [his] soul to be saved,” he just didn’t know what to do. He grew up hating being observed and usually resolved to make himself as small as possible.
• The closest thing he had to an escape was video games and forums. His parents and most of his relatives had superstitions regarding anything scarier than Thomas the Tank Engine, so the only place he could play games, read comics, or watch non-Evangelical TV was at one of his cousins’ house. At this point in his life he was 10-12 and living with an aunt and uncle in a trashy neighborhood full of decaying old cars and soon-to-be-demolished townhouses. He could come and go wherever he wanted with no supervision, so everyday he’d go to his cousin’s house and play his N64 and Atari, and they’d go on the computer together to read game walk-throughs and the like. With few games to choose from, he quickly began idolizing Link, who was basically the only cool fictional character he knew about besides like, old man western movie protags.
• In early 2002, he started asking questions on a mysterious thread on a N64 forum about “ascending to everlasting-life” in the form of “soul digitization”. Up to this point he was deeply familiar with the rhetoric of Evangelism, and even believed in much of it, but thought the claims of the thread seemed blasphemous since such things could only be achieved through the church. After some confusing correspondence he was direct-messaged by the author and given a PDF guide on “ascension”. (it is important to note this user was not Kelbris, who was already dead and haunting the cartridge. This user’s exact relation to the Moon Child cult was unknown.) The promises of the guide, that Ben could ascend by killing himself and become his favorite character, had some air of truth to him, given everything he had been taught at that point. The user encouraging him was persistent in praising him, promising the process had already been proven, and it would be a better fate than anything that awaited him in life. It can’t be said whether he fully bought into it or not, but he desperately wanted it to be true. He drowned himself in his cousin’s bathroom on 23 April, with the game running in the other room.
• [insert every BD story arc here im not gonna recap the entire ARG lol]
• for 8 suffocatingly long years, Ben was trapped, body and soul, inside the Elegy of Time statue in the Majora’s Mask cartridge. It’s not easy to explain or even conceptualize the experience of being in complete and total isolation, trapped in one fixed spot, unable to move or feel or hear, for nearly a decade. He could only think. He believed, as soon as he became aware of his surroundings, that he was in hell, and every passing year it became clear he was there to stay. For years he would regularly try to scream, cry, move his body in any way, knowing it was impossible. Being completely unable to sleep or turn his own thoughts off, he started making an infinite list of every sin he had committed, eventually picking apart the reasons he must have been pre-destined to end up there. He would dwell on this list everyday for 8 years, in between listing his favorite comic book characters (1. Green Lantern, 2. Robin, 3. Ghostrider, and so on)
• As of now, 22 years after his death, he still occupies the world of the game, but has been living in the body of the real Link since 2020. he can be interfaced with by running the game, although the game itself is unplayable and the mechanics (ie, the 3-day time limit) are no longer in place. Ben is able to manipulate the world of the game as if it were reality, not bound by mechanics or controls. Other ascended people exist in the world, though most of them have no memory of the time before Kelbris reset it, only memories of having been alive and then entering the game. Ben retains memories but is unable to feel much about his time as the Elegy, experiencing a kind of half-reset.
• His soul is currently 34 years old, though without much exposure to the world before his ascension, he is still preoccupied with childish interests and behaviors. He acts like a teenager and isn’t very interested in the real world, though he has learned new things from the people who ascended after him and is interested in their lives and “adult things”, and likes learning about new movies and music (which he can interface with easily by seeing/hearing them from the outside world.) All in all its kind of like he’s perpetually on a zoom call. Its not… that bad.
• The game cartridge itself, through a series of convenient and indescribable circumstances, has turned up at the gang’s house and is run almost constantly on a nice old CRT TV in the nasty kitchen no one uses. Jeff sometimes interacts with him, but treats him like he’s really Link and doesn’t understand why Ben doesn’t go where he wants him to, which drives him crazy. Some of the proxies that come by the house like him enough to think of him as a friend, and often appreciate (or make fun of) his levity and childishness. No one really thinks of Ben as a “real” proxy, since his only relation to the gang is that they take care of him. They’re not the best people to learn about the world from, but some of them will play music for Ben or tell him about what (they think) is going on in the world, and other things he never got to learn.
• He hasn’t thought much about his upbringing since he was the Elegy. It’s difficult to say if he’s “moved past it” since he doesn’t really have any reason to think about his place in the world anymore. He gets to live on, in this detached and fantastical form, for as long as the game will still run. He doesn’t care about life or death and hasn’t for a long time, but a part of him has learned to love the “life” that he has, helpless as he is.

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