Community:Ben Drowned

Ben Drowned is a creepypasta story and alternate reality game written by Alex Hall. Taking place over three story arcs, it first recounted events from the perspective of Jadusable, a college student who received a second-hand copy of from an eccentric old man's garage sale. The latter story arcs diverged from the first-person narrative established by Jadusable, featuring a wider array of characters and an interactive plot that explored the group responsible for the cartridge and, ten years later, the consequences of their actions.

The story rapidly gained traction throughout the wider gaming community during its original run on /x/, 4chan's Paranormal board, from September 7 to September 15, 2010. During the second arc, Hall revealed that his story outgrew its initial scope and would need to be put on hiatus. The second arc finished in 2011, where the story would remain until its conclusion began on March 17, 2020. Ben Drowned concluded on Halloween of that year.

Story
The narrative of Ben Drowned took place over three separate story arcs, each with their own methods of storytelling and interaction with the audience.

The Haunted Cartridge
On September 7, 2010, a college student using the name "Jadusable" made his first post on /x/ regarding his experience with a shady copy of Majora's Mask, which was in the standard grey cartridge with "MAJORA" written where the label should have been. After receiving the game from an old man's garage sale, Jadusable brought it home and noticed that a save file named "BEN" was left behind by the previous owner.

Over the next five days, Jadusable would post updates to his original summary, each with attached videos showing his gameplay. The first video, day four.wmv, featured out-of-place sounds, missing textures, and the continuous appearance of an Series: statue, seemingly chasing Jadusable throughout each area. Each subsequent video would show increasingly disturbing events, with Jadusable's summaries growing more panicked. The penultimate /x/ post was made by Jadusable's roommate, who announced that Jadusable had moved back home.

Three days later, a document promised by the roommate, titled TheTruth.rtf, was released to the public per Jadusable's wishes. The document contained an even more detailed account of the incident, revealing that BEN had gained access to Jadusable's computer when the console's capture card was connected to it, as well as the apparent presence of a second entity. Between the game sessions, BEN would speak to Jadusable via Cleverbot, an AI bot-chatting website, with each interaction wearing on Jadusable's mental state. The final section of the document made it clear that Jadusable lived in a single dorm and therefore had no roommate, ending with a heartfelt thanks to those who had stuck with him throughout the experience.

108 minutes after the document was posted, a final video titled "free.wmv" was uploaded to Jadusable's YouTube channel. Still taking place within Majora's Mask, its sole contents were a black screen and the text, "The counter resets. I'm glad you did that." Shortly afterward, viewers noticed that his YouTube avatar had been changed to an Elegy of Emptiness statue.

Moon Children
Two days after free.wmv was uploaded, Jadusable's channel began posting coded messages. Once solved, viewers were directed to a website for the Moon Children, a cult dedicated to the moon. On first glance, one could see three active moderators making posts on the main page. After some searching, readers noticed various connections between the site and the prior incident with Jadusable, the most pressing of which being a hidden webpage that explicitly referenced Ben. This page contained a countdown set to end on the following night. The next day, some readers managed to contact one of the site's moderators, Ifrit, who revealed that Ben was once a member of the Moon Children and had disappeared. As a result of contacting him by Gmail, his real name was revealed to be Matt.

As the countdown neared its end, Ifrit told those emailing him, "Hang on, someone is knocking at my door." These messages coincided with a post on Jadusable's channel with a set of lyrics from The Genies' "Who's That Knocking": "What's that calling, calling my name/Tossed a brick through my window pane/Boom boom boom, bang bang bang". When the countdown finished at 9:00pm EST, the site directed readers to a new video from Alex, a former member of the cult, depicting Link playing the Series:. Shortly afterward, the site was taken offline, leaving the audience with the realization that they had just been sent back in time by three days.

The next day, readers discovered that the site was back up, yet in an earlier and more incomplete state than when it was discovered. Notable among these minor differences was that no mentions of Ifrit were present on the site, with a different moderator, Insidiae, taking his place on the site's main page. Over the next several hours, readers attempted in vain to contact Ifrit. On a whim, one person decided to respond to one of Jadusable's videos using YouTube's since-defunct video response function, uploading the Series:. This triggered a response on the channel, confirming that playing songs from Majora's Mask would have an effect on future events. Several songs would be played over the next few hours; however, as an unfortunate result of the audience's lack of coordination, yet another person was lost to the entity who had knocked on Ifrit's door the previous night. During the rush of events, its identity was seemingly revealed as Kelbris, the vengeful founder of the cult who had apparently been killed years earlier.

The Song of Time was played once again, resetting the cycle for the final time. Just a few hours into the cycle, however, the curtain was drawn and the author, Alex Hall, announced that the story would be put on hold for the time being. The site was converted into a hub for readers to re-read the story from, and appeared to be a solely out-of-character site.

A few weeks later, on October 6, readers who refreshed the site in the early hours of the morning were met with a disturbing sequence of site changes. Among them was the discovery of over 60 hidden files. Many of these files were assets visibly in use by the site, but a substantial number were entirely new; cryptic text documents, disturbing audio files, and previously-unseen images, many hidden behind passwords. One such document, Ifrit's final words, contained two ciphers, one of which is unsolved to this day. The other, which read, "KAYD HENDRICKS YOU ARE IN DANGER", led to a brief intermission wherein the aforementioned Kayd attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to evade the grasp of the unseen entity chasing him.

The next few months would see sparse activity, but nothing substantial. Readers would ultimately wait until February 17 for the introduction to the next phase of the story. That day, a new forum called Within Hubris was created as a central hub for the story, attempting to bring together the various groups who had formed in the previous months. Soon afterward, the site was revealed to be itself a new incarnation of the story, with secret forum groups appearing and disappearing within moments. One of these, titled Wayward Horizon, contained posts that heavily implied that several of the Moon Children's souls were trapped in the site, with each reacting differently. A new video was uploaded the following week, teasing the future storyline, but this would ultimately be the final piece of the second story arc, followed by a nine-year-long hiatus.

Awakening
The first canon video in nine years was uploaded to Jadusable's channel on March 17, 2020. The first section of the story was told with two parallel timelines, with the first narrated by "Jadus", a survivor of a cataclysmic viral outbreak that has ravaged society. Throughout his videos, he described the ways his life was affected by total societal collapse, from the initial public response to scouring ruins to find survivors for his settlement. His story came to a pause following the revelation that he was asked by a friend of his, Baker, to leave St. Louis before the impending riot made it impossible, and that this was the last thing he remembered before he "woke up on a cold tile floor on the 23rd of April."

The other timeline in this story appeared to continue the narrative established in The Haunted Cartridge, albeit in a disjointed and fragmented way. Footage from Majora's Mask appeared scattered throughout several videos, but the nature of these videos was not made clear until the upload of CHILDREN.wmv, one of Jadusable's own videos that had not been uploaded at the time. This video confirmed the presence of a second entity, an idea briefly hinted at in TheTruth.rtf and during Moon Children, and that it inhabited an unused character model. Running concurrently with these videos was methodsofrevolution.com, a repurposed blog containing a number of secret pages. Over the next few weeks, the site acted as a method of deciding the next course of action, with each newly-discovered page answering old questions and raising new ones. This phase ended with the upload of THE FATHER.wmv, the true final video recorded by Jadusable, and a definitive confirmation of his death at the end of The Haunted Cartridge.

The second phase of the story began on April 23 with the upload of the first video in the "Methods of Revolution" series. This series followed a newly-awakened and unnamed "Second Player" after waking up in the bathroom of a hotel in which those who leave their rooms are terminated. Several days pass before he is compelled to leave, making it to the next floor before being caught by the jailer. After his termination, a woman named Sarah awakened in his place, and upon deciding to remain in her room, she was presented with a gift: a Nintendo 64 and the very same Majora's Mask cartridge previously played by Jadusable.

Sarah then began her journey into the broken world inside the cartridge, finding it in an unstable state as a result of The Father's influence. After playing the Song of Healing to Ben, the child trapped inside of the Elegy statue, she was given a mask that transformed Link into his adult form. With this newfound power and the goal of saving everyone inside the cartridge from The Father, Sarah played the Song of Time. This resulted not only in a return to the Dawn of the First Day, but in the world's total reversion to the state it was in prior to Jadusable's arrival.

Sarah's arrival in Clock Town was followed by an encounter with the same unused NPC encountered by Jadusable in CHILDREN.wmv, who would later be identified as Matt. Matt then instructed Sarah to defeat the four Moon Children and activate the Fourth Day glitch as a means of weakening The Father. Her journey to defeat the Moon Children and their respective bosses progressed, with each area presenting new challenges and encounters with others trapped inside the cartridge. After defeating three of the Moon Children, her progress was interrupted by another Link, inhabiting the body left behind by her when she obtained the Adult Link mask. This other Link, intent on killing her, donned the Series: and challenged her to a fight. His identity was then revealed as Jadusable, who had himself been trapped inside the cartridge after his death. The duel ended with Sarah's defeat, and shortly afterward, a new website was revealed.

The new site, run by the Eternity Project, described a revolutionary method of preserving one's consciousness after death by uploading it to a digital medium, allowing the deceased to live forever in their favorite movies, video games, or even alternate worlds that parallel our own. By digging through the site's archives and accessing an older version of it, readers revealed that the Moon Children was an experiment conducted by the Eternity Project, with its members' consciousnesses confined inside of the Majora's Mask cartridge, dubbed "World άλφα", after their deaths. More digging would reveal a way to reverse Sarah's death and allow her to continue playing, which was successfully implemented.

In the time since her death, the world had deteriorated so much that basic functions of the game were now impossible. Sarah found her way to the Mayor's Residence and witnessed a meeting between the few remaining denizens of World άλφα, which was now experiencing its final hours on the Final Day. They argued among themselves about whether to stop the Series: from crashing or to just accept their fates as the world collapses like it did before. Sarah then set out with her final objective to activate the Fourth Day glitch, which was ultimately successful. Matt appeared soon afterward to thank Sarah for activating the glitch and dooming the world to its destruction by The Father, which in reality would not have been possible without the glitch. After witnessing NPCs burning the Happy Mask Salesman at the stake, she entered the Clock Tower only to find Ben and a weakened Jadusable awaiting their doom. Jadusable then revealed that his plan to stop Sarah was for the good of World άλφα, knowing that her objective would doom everyone inside it. In one last attempt to stop Matt and the final Moon Child from summoning The Father, Jadusable passed his soul and strength to Sarah, sacrificing himself and allowing her a chance to defeat them.

Sarah then began her final approach, engaging Majora's Wrath in combat after some taunting by Matt. Her hits appeared to be ineffective against it despite Jadusable's power transfer, and with her last hearts she equipped the Ocarina of Time and played the Song of Healing as a desperate final resort. This succeeded in killing Majora's Wrath, causing Matt great distress. Moments later, Matt disappeared. As Sarah turned around, she came face to face with The Father, who revealed that his actions are reflexive and that he is designed to respond to the world's stimuli; being attacked by Jadusable and called upon by Matt caused the world's destruction, where Sarah's peaceful reaction prompted him to speak. This allowed his reactive parameters to be changed, and as a result of his new directive to keep the world safe from harm, all anomalies were determined to be incompatible. Sarah, an anomaly herself, accepted her fate, knowing that the world would not remember her or Jadusable's sacrifices after the reset. The Father then removed her from World άλφα.

The story ended here, with Sarah's ultimate fate and the status of the Eternity Project's simulated worlds left ambiguous.

Development
The first story arc of Ben Drowned was written by Alex Hall during his second year of college. Following its viral success, he continued the story intermittently over the next few months on a budget provided by PayPal donations.

The original third arc of the story, titled Hubris, was largely intended to be experienced via an in-development game that would have been supplemented by changes to the existing Within Hubris forum. However, the lack of communication between the team and Hall resulted in the story's semi-permanent hiatus in July 2011. Following this, Hall expressed his intention to finish the story following the release of his film, titled Methods of Revolution, which remained in development hell for several years. When the Awakening story arc began in March 2020, the former Hubris arc was recategorized as the final section of the Moon Children arc.