Dave Brackham was most commonly known as Unforgiven676. He knew that in his world, having numbers on your name would qualify you as lame but he was busy making a statement with it. He had no real friends; the remains of what friendships he had were destroyed when he got his new apartment and "Work-Only Phone". He figured he was happier with a screen instead. After all, which other friends could talk, play games and show your pornography? Not many, I hope.

He usually woke up every morning around 9:30 on the days he didn't work. When he was working, he was up at 9:25, allowing five extra minutes for him to drink a glass of orange juice. Either way, he always managed to log on to his favourite website, filled with unhopeful, right-wing technicians like himself. His intelligence had bought him a fairly decent job, but it was of little use in social skills when Dave Brackham was a bigot. Taunting all those "lower" than him was a basic task of his Internet life.

He had friends within his best friend, or rather, the people he argued with all the time but never actually met. All belonging to his favourite website, there was firstly DumbassDude, who was always an idiot (he often claimed of an appetite for sand paper which irritated Dave) but Dave forgave him because of respectable Internet stats. Likewise about PsyChaos' statistics who was as badass as Dave on the Internet. Of course, Dave wasn't a badass in reality; he was just growing in his stolen office chair in his dank apartment but that's part of the fun on the Internet. Dave often liked to joke that PsyChaos had a "gagoobly long e-penis", using a word from a 54 page Word document of made up words he once supposedly penned. Similarly to PsyChaos was Lost-Chances who was influential as far as these online forums were concerned, but it bugged Dave that he was just some fifteen year old Brit (as well as racist he was an ageist too as you might expect). Finally, there was Sidorio who was just there for Dave to piss off, especially with his thoughts surrounding England (Sidorio was another limey bastard and proud of it, much to Dave's amusement).

So, there was this cheery gang, and sometimes several others who attempted to contact Dave through an Instant Messaging client for whatever reason: to condemn, to praise, to brown-nose. With the advent of "norm n00bs" as Dave called them, arriving onto the Internet from either one of those goody-goody friend websites or through the website of some unknown indie rock band proclaimed to be "world-famous", Dave had more requests for contact from these morons: "lol hi." they'd say, "ow r u? im crap!" , would squeeze out just before Dave deleted them. He didn't like this indie rock trend they carried either, usually rocking out himself (through his headphones) to Grand Funk's Greatest Hits or The Eagles without caring if the music was released some ten years before he was born; it was better than the shit most of the people in cyberland sent him.

It was one day that Dave was "ill" from work he started feeling a little eerie. He had an e-penis (ego) to defend, and it was sometimes too large to defend for one man. He logged onto his favourite website as usual and, as usual PsyChaos was on the message boards and so Dave decided to join him in a game of Flame Wars. Luckily, DumbassDude had posted about his sand paper problems again giving them plenty of ammunition. Lost-Chances had beaten them to it with a snide remark hinting at DumbassDude's stupidity but Dave wasn't about to let two Brit kids get away with beating his online ego, with this "brilliant" post:

God, it's every time I log on you're trying to make us all laugh by pretending you're stupid. Just lay it off fuckface. And that goes for any other of you morons…

PsyChaos posted how much he laughed at this comment but to Dave, this was a serious business. He couldn't let people get away with stupidity, not on his turf.

Later on, he was still browsing around the forums, testing an urban legend saying if you posted 1,000 times in a day, you received a letter from the administrator offering congratulations. A load of crap of course but Dave was just curious…and he had to know. When he was browsing a section, he found a post entitled "I'm in love". Psyched up for laughs, he found a suicidal fourteen year old from Michigan crying over some girl while giving everyone some fancy descriptions of her (including the exact colour of her lipstick). Dave laughed momentarily, then commenced his bright flaming:

Haha, you're 14. You can't have feelings for anyone or anything. Just fuck off. Listen to Bullet For My Valentine. Toodles.

Dave unanxiously waited for a reply, which he received after two minutes or so:

Jesus dude, no need to be soo rude. I was onli askin for help after tryin so many other places. You're just a bully."

Dave laughed. He may as well have signed it "Father of this child" he thought and laughed out loud at his reference only dozens would understand. If he's real, he'll be crying, he thought and laughed again.

Around 6pm that evening, Dave received an e-mail in his public hotmail inbox from an unknown address. Wary of any viruses, he turned on his protection software and opened it. He groaned at the sight of a chain letter that had been forwarded incorrectly with all the junk at the bottom. Might as well pretend to give a joogle he thought. What was being forwarded was:

A long time ago, during a war in a toiling African nation, a girl was raped and murdered by a man who was courting her sister. As he buried her body, which he had skinned, he chanted "Hum baeg hum baeg I um". Now that you have read this curse, the spirit of the young girl will wake you up at night and stare at you with her hideous face from the ceiling, where she will perform the same bloody tasks the man did to her. Forward this to 10 people and be free from the curse…trust me.

Dave was vaguely surprised he hadn't heard this one before. He just smirked and clicked delete as he did with all this rubbish; chances are if it was forwarded properly, he wouldn't have read it.

As usual, Dave stayed up till about 1am, where he collapsed soundly asleep into his bed which was really just a mattress. He fell asleep as he always did, quickly (perhaps due to his tranquilisers) and soundly.

He was awakened at 3:24am by a crash coming from his desk. He took a minute for his eye to tune to the darkness and glance toward the desk. From what he could make out, his lamp had bone knocked over, probably by wind from his open window, despite the face there really wasn't much of a dream. I suppose I'll be up for ages now, he thought and sighed and shifted back into his bedsheets.

It was now he looked at the ceiling, into the gray eyes of the long haired ghoul. Parts of its skin were hanging off and it was grinning as if it had found dinner. It opened its mouth while Dave was paralysed with fear. The shadow cast along the room and you could make out by looking at it that the monster was withdrawing a knife. Dave screamed, but noone came. He has no friends and doesn't care about anyone so why should anyone come?

Where's Unforgiven?

Probably out at the Star Trek convention.

Lol.