A/N: This story is based off of the Twitch Plays Pokemon "canon," from a series of subjectively interpreted events from crowdplayed Pokemon games. The depiction of Bill, in particular, is based off of a screencap comic series called "Bill-Sanctioned Shenanigans," by Reddit's ZetsuTheFirst, otherwise known as LifeIsButAFleetingShadow here on .

This story, based on one of our abandoned Pokemon Mystery Dungeon urns (runs), is dedicated to him and his work. It is also dedicated to what I consider to be the single most amazing character he has created: the character of Twitch Plays Pokemon's Bill.

Through an amnesiac protagonist, hopefully I'll be able to keep this story relevant even to those of you who don't know the world and "lore" of Twitch Plays Pokemon.

Enjoy, and don't feed the trolls. We will become dependent.

. . .

Up.

"Five more minutes, Zigzagoon," I muttered under my breath.

Wait - Zigzagoon? Who on earth was Zigzag...

UP. The voice was insistent.

No, not a voice - Voices. More than one. A chorus in my head, speaking in unison, clearly ordering my body to pick itself up off the grass and get a move on.

Wait, why was I on the grass? I didn't remember being outside the li...

Scratch that. I didn't remember being inside, outside, in my lady's chamber, anywhere. I didn't remember where I was, who I was, or what I was doing. Heck with it, judging from how strange it felt to exist, I barely even remembered how it felt to be alive.

My own body felt alien - it was stubby, brown, pudgy, furry, and smelled like soot. I felt like I'd been toasted in an oven and was exactly the color to prove it. There was some sort of light, hard, oddly shaped helmet enveloping my head, and my entire right arm felt tingly. And was clutching a long thin something that I certainly didn't remember picking up.

Somehow I felt like something was off, that this couldn't be, that this just wasn't reality at all. But what else did I have to compare to it?

My memory was blank.

UP POGCHAMP!

I got up. "Yes, Mum," I said sarcastically to the disembodied voices that were, like everything else, completely unfamiliar. "Anything else you want from me? A cup of tea? Ice cream? An omelette?"

Wait, what was an omelette?

I paused and mulled this over. All things considered, I decided it wasn't important at the time.

Once I was up on my feet, I managed to get a good look at my surroundings. Pale green grass, several large, lush pine trees, a few stumps, and a not-at-all-suspicious bleached arm bone lying right by my feet where I'd left it.

An arm bone?!

I jumped back from the old bone as if it were a snake about to bite me. Some dark shred of a memory ripped through my skull, something involving red eyes and red blood, something...

My skull. Speaking of my skull, there was something on top of it, something which slipped as I jumped back (and tripped awkwardly; why did nobody ever tell me that I had a tail?), something which obscured my vision momentarily until I took it off and saw that...

...oh... kay... then.

It was another skull. I was wearing somebody else's skull over my own skull. Skullception.

Yeah, that's not at all creepy. Whose skull WAS it, anywa-

BILL IS DEAD

Holy Pigeot.

Perhaps I'd been tuning out those Voices in my head for a while. Or perhaps I just couldn't properly hear them yet. But as soon as I started wondering just what the heck had happened to the former owner of these bones, the Voices started "celebrating":

WE KILLED BILL

RIP IN PIECES BILL

AOOOOOOO POGCHAMP

VICTORY RIOT

Now, mind you, I had no idea who Bill even was at that time. (Lucky me, as it were.) But when you're surrounded by bones, don't remember anything whatsoever before waking up three seconds earlier, and you have voices in your head bragging about killing someone, it's easy to jump to conclusions.

It was a completely natural reaction, but I'm still not proud of it. I threw both bones to the ground and ran, screaming like a traumatized Whismur.

. . .

I don't know what I thought running from the Voices would accomplish. I couldn't see where they were, I didn't know what they were, and I had no real way of getting away from them. But it's basic human nature to run from anything that brags about killing people and leaving them in pieces, so that's precisely what I did.

Even though I clearly wasn't human.

I had no idea which way to run, of course, as I didn't know where I was or how I'd gotten there. But if everyone had to stop and carefully think about where they were running before they started fleeing for their lives, they wouldn't have lives to flee for in the end. So I just ran.

The Voices had no problem with this. Ironically, they seemed to enjoy it. In fact, I'd run a fair distance before I realized that 1. I was going around in circles, and 2. I was going in exactly the direction that the Voices were telling me to run in.

As I realized the moment I tripped over the same skull I'd tossed away fifteen minutes before.

. . .

"Hey, are you okay?"

That wasn't the Voices. It was somebody, or something, else.

I felt a set of warm hands, reptilian hands, pull me up off the ground where I'd tripped. I felt hot breath from the orange-scaled bipedal saurian that owned them.

And I heard the other voice. Her voice. Warm... caring... but mostly warm, as she was after all a fire-type. And it was a heck of a lot more sympathetic than the Voices of the murdermongers.

"Abby?"

I don't know if I somehow recognized her in a dark and ancient corner of my mind, or if the Voices remembered for me. Maybe the Voices didn't even recognize her for real, and just thought that every Charmander was named Abby for some odd reason.

ABBY

She's alive guys

WE SAVED ABBY

And it was the real Abby, somehow, although she blushed to be recognized. She seemed almost surprised - but not entirely surprised. "I... you know me?"

OH ABBY HOW WE MISSED YOU

WE HAVE AVENGED YOU ABBY

WE KILLED BILL AND SAVED ABBY

Wait, wasn'tittheFalseProphetthatkilledher?

WHO CARES POGCHAMP

I gulped as Abby helped me to my feet. I kept my voice as calm as humanly possible, despite not being human. "I... look, I know this sounds creepy, but I swear I never saw you before in my life." (Sadly inaccurate, though I didn't know it yet.) "No, it's the creepy murderous voices in my head that recognize you, and if I were you, I'd let go of me before they decide to do to you what they did to this guy." I pointed to the skull and arm bone in my hands and made a subtle slashing motion with my claws as a warning.

The Charmander looked down at the bones and blinked. And then, to my utter shock and terror, she started laughing.

It wasn't a nasty laugh, of course; to this day, I don't think I've ever heard a nasty laugh out of that Pokemon at all. But you understand, I was very unstable at the time. I had no memory of my past life (surprisingly fortunate), I had a bunch of murderous Voices in my head (unsurprisingly unfortunate), and I was naturally on edge and suspicious of everything. And from what the Voices had said, it sounded exactly as if Abby and the murder-Voices were all in cahoots, so I backed away in terror about as quickly as the Voices would let me.

But it wasn't a nasty laugh at all. Actually, it was a sympathetic one. "Silly... those are old bones, Cubone! They're not fresh! They're from the Marowak Graveyard!"

I blinked. Cubone and Marowak were terms that I vaguely remembered, or at least thought I ought to remember, but the important part was what I did understand. I looked down at the bones I was holding and realized that Abby was right. The bones were dry, without a hint of blood or even recent violence on them. And while the arm bone was scratched up, the skull was... oddly pristine.

"They don't match," I said disbelievingly. "I... I don't even think they're from the same being."

"Naturally," Abby shrugged. "They're from the Marowak Graveyard, remember? Countless generations of Cubone, Marowak, and orphaned Kangaskhan have lived and died wearing those bones as armor. They're sort of a cultural tradition. Granted, a lot of people find it creepy, but it's sort of their way of remembering their roots. Who they really are, and who came before them."

I stared at the bones in annoyance, brushing a thin dusting of sparkling ashes off of a crevice in the skull. I didn't really care to touch a dead thing, but I suppose my hands wanted to keep themselves busy.

"Well, Ms. Abby, that is one distastefully obnoxious bit of irony for me. I don't know who I am. I barely even know who you are, and that's because of those dratted Voi..."

My own voice trailed off, as I started to seriously question the legitimacy of trusting someone associated with these bloodthirsty Voices.

She blinked. "The Voices in your head..." she said, sounding sad. "I assure you, they're no friends of mine. I've encountered them so many times, but each time..."

She paused. "They took my friends away from me. And they took me away from my friends."

I could guess how. "They... killed people close to you?"

The Voices had gone quiet in my head at this point, mercifully enough. Probably from guilt - at least, I hope so. (Pity it didn't last.)

Abby sounded as if she was going to say something, but wasn't sure what. "They... they might have. I... I'm honestly not sure what they did to them..."

She quickly checked over her shoulder. "But we can't stand around Tiny Woods gabbing all day. Dangerous things could happen here. You're not the first one who's woken up here with Voices in your head and loss of memory, and you may not be the last. And if the pattern repeats, you could be in great danger."

I should have paid more attention to those words.

But, sadly for everyone, I did not. "Oh, yes, because having murder-Voices in my head isn't dangerous enough already. Oh, you wouldn't happen to know who Bill was, would you?"

The look of shock in her eyes when I said that name could have curdled milk into cheese. It certainly curdled my stomach.

"Who... did the Voices tell you that name?"

Well, yeah. Who else could have been talking to me all this time? This was the middle of the woods, for crying out loud.

But I didn't say that out loud. "They... said they... actually, they said WE... just... killed him..."

And as I said it, I received the sinking suspicion that I'd heard Bill's name somewhere before. Couldn't put a face to it, unfortunately, but I'd definitely heard it before.

There was silence. Dead silence, as dead as the owner of the skull and the bone. Abby kept staring at me - not with malice or hatred, but with a nevertheless fierce intensity, as if her gaze was going to bore holes through my skin.

I was about to suggest that she might have to arrest me, when she suddenly did something to me that made no sense whatsoever: she snatched the Marowak skull out of my hands and forced it firmly on my head.

"Hey!" I yelled. "That hurt! And this skull smells funny!"

"Well, get used to it. People see a Cubone running around without a skull on, they're going to start asking awkward questions. Questions you won't be able to answer. At least with this thing on, you'll look normal."

"I'm not sure I want to look normal!" The skull-helmet felt hot, stifling, confining. "Don't you realize the significance of what I just said? The memory loss, the Voices-"

"Exactly why you need to not attract attention, genius," Abby snorted. Even as I tried repeatedly to take the skull off, she kept pushing it back on, as if she was trying to literally slam some sense inside my head. "We need to get you some help with this whole 'Voice Syndrome' business you've come down with. Hey, ever heard of that? Voice Syndrome?"

The Voices came back in my head, buzzing angrily and clearly of the opinion that they were being maligned. I won't be so crude as to repeat what they actually said, but I believe comparisons were made between Bill and somebody else whose name I had genuinely never heard in my life.

"I don't recall anything specific," I admitted. "But the Voices do. Who's Hitler?"

Abby snorted. "Helixdomeit all if I know who Hitler was. Probably another Voice victim. But we've got to get you SOMEWHERE before-"

"Abby!" another voice said, from elsewhere in the forest. "ABBY!"

The Charmander groaned. "Aaaaaand right on schedule. Ms. Ozworm again."

Still confused. "Ms... Ozworm?"

Abby grabbed my arm and pulled me in the direction of the voice, "Just come on, stay silent, keep your skull on, and whatever you do, Don't. Mention. MURDER!"

"But I may have-"

"Don't mention it!"

She had a pretty strong grip, and worst of all, the Voices took her side. I was clearly outvoted on the use of my own body, and I had the sinking suspicion in the pit of my stomach that all of this was going to end poorly. Very, very poorly.

And in the end, I was absolutely right.

. . .

They say that you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

My name is Bill.

This is the story of how I died...