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Sam was on his laptop. The laptop looked small compared to his giant hands and giant body. He is so very giant. It looked like a laptop for children, but he had some technological shit up on that thing. Like, he had a black box with green text, like this was some kind of old school hacking shit. What is this, Cygwin? He was researching Supernatural happenings using a command-line interface? Shouldn’t he be reading like every small town newspaper ever, combing the stories for “leads”? Anyway, all his Windows-sponsored internet shenanigans paid off, because he’s found something. If there were a way to use an EMP reader on Inernet activity, that thing would be going weeeeeee! WEEEEEoooooEEEEeeeEEEE except an EMP reader always would near electromagnetic pulses and guess what computers are made of? Electromagnents! But suffice to say, spooky jooky shit was happening in the unreadable files of the internet. Not the files everyone sees on the internet, the youtube videos and the jpegs and the GIFs and what have you, but the secret files you can only access if you inspect the element of a page, or if you hack into someone’s computer and use Unix commands to show the hidden files, and see files that can neither be read nor written, only executed, and felt in the dark parts inside a body, between the shadow and the soul.
“Hey Dean, check this out,” said Sam. Dean wheeled over. “It started as just a routine check into some cattle mutilations, but then I saw what they were all centered around.” Sam pulled up a map of a rural location, dominated by a vast fortress of storage. “I checked the records, and this storage facility is what all the strange mojo is centered around.”
“Well, who owns the facility?” asked Dean.
“A tech company. It’s not just any kind of storage, Dean. It’s server storage. Yeah. Tech companies rent space to keep their servers to store their data on. Top notch security. And get this: this facility exclusively houses Tumblr’s servers.”
“Who is Tumbler? Tumbler what, Incorporated?” asked Dean.
“No, not Tumbler, Dean. Tumblr."
“Tumbler.”
“Tumblr. There’s no e.”
“Why is the e missing?”
“I don’t know. A reference to Gadsby, maybe?”
“What does the letter E have to do with The Great Gatsby?”
“No, Gadsby not Gatsby… look, can we just turn the subtitles on for this bit? Sam picked up a remote and pointed it at the control panel. Menu>Subtitles>English>On.
“Thanks,” said Dean. “You know I’m not into that stuff. We should have put them on as soon as you started staying words with missing E’s.”
Below Dean, hovering somewhere by his waist, the words “Thanks. You know I’m not into that stuff. We should have put them on as soon as your started saying words with missing E’s.” in bright yellow letters.
“So what happened to the E? Is that our case?”
Below Dean, the words read “[SARCASTICALLY] Is that our case?”
“Nope. Turns out they found it, but then it stopped working, and now everyone uses xkit anyway so the E is neither here nor there. Tumblr is our case. The missing e may be a clue. Whatever bad mojo is causing those strange cattle deaths is coming form the servers."
The words, behind their backs, said “[OMINOUS MUSIC PLAYS]”
“Well have you looked at their website?”
“Yes, I looked at their website!” said Sam, exasperated that his brother—no , not brother—partner, thought he hadn’t thought of that.
“Dude, what’s that?” asked Dean, pointing to the subtitles. "Why are you exasperated by my routine questions?"
[EXASPERATEDLY] hung in the air below Sam in that ubiquitous yellow print, soon joined with [SAM SIGHS], as Sam did indeed sigh. “Eyes up here,” said Sam motioning to his face. “Don’t look at those. Look at me. Of course I looked at the website.”
“Well…? Did you find anything?”
“I found a lot of things, Dean. You know, I might have even found all the things,” said Sam.
“All the things?” asked Dean.
“Yes, you heard me! And you read them on the subtitles too! All the things! Like the meme… like Allie Brosch… you uneducated swine,” said Sam.
“Whoa-ho there! Pump the breaks! How you doin’? Is it the trials?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me…” said Sam, but it wasn’t Sam’s voice that came out, it was Benedict Cumberbatch's.
Dean backed away, thinking is brother was possessed. “Sammy... Sammy… is that you in there!?”
[WORRIED ANGER INTENSIFIES]
Dean dumped a glass of water—presumably holy—onto Sam.
“It’s me, it’s me, “ said Sam. “I’m not possessed… I’m obsessed. I haven’t even seen the show and I….” Sam started twitching, “just have so many” [TWITCHING INTENSIFIES] “FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELLLLLLLSSSS!”
Later, Sam was in his bed. They’ve confiscated his electronics from him. No windows laptop, no windows tablet thing, no windows phone. “Not even television or books are safe for him now,” said Castiel, summoned by [DEAN PRAYING] and arriving with [WINGS FLAPPING]. “In Heaven, I watched many humans, young and old, get sucked into this Tumblr. Usually this happens when parents are trying to limit the amount of time their young spend online, otherwise, these things mostly run their course. They find a fandom, they find another fandom, pretty soon they have mutual follows, then before you know it, the fandom isn’t what it used to be, your favorite blogs stop posting, and you’re back in the real world. What was Sam doing on that infernal Website anyway?” asked Castiel.
“Research. For a case. There’s something not right about that website. It’s not natural. They were just strange cattle deaths surrounding a storage facility, so we checked what was inside and it’s just servers, Tumblr servers—“
“So he just goes and reads Tumblr? That’s like finding out a bunch of livestock had died of a mysterious curse outside a cursed library and then just going inside the library and reading all the cursed books. Let me tell you something: Tumblr is evil. They are not on the side of the angels. I would not be surprised to find Crowley is the a main stock holder since his lookalikes frequent the pages of so many blogs. It’s how he gets new souls. Welcome to Tumblr. Please agree to our Terms of Service. They agree, and then he owns their soul."
“So now Crowley owns my brother’s soul?” asked Dean. [ENRAGED] lit up below him.
“Just delete his account and I’m sure it will be fine. Most are not so fortunate. There are unholy, infernal things afoot around Tumblr. This is a job much too big for the Winchesters. To destroy Tumblr, we would need angelic recourse, and the angels are too divided into factions to rally to crush the demon at the heart of it all. That great, blue demon, whose name is so unspeakable we only know Its abbreviation: T.U.M.B.L.R. because to hear Its name, like hearing the true name of God, would blow any human mind, quite literally, out the eye sockets in an infernal light.”