By the time the city woke up, The Masked Creep had turned from a shaky video into a character.
Every news site had a headline.
"Mystery Man in Black Frightens Women in Alley"
"Who Is the Masked Creep?"
"Urban Legend or Real Threat?"
Morning talk shows ran the footage with blurred faces and yellow arrows.
One channel froze the frame where the girl hit my chest and circled my shoulder like it was some kind of evidence.
"Notice how he doesn't even react," the host said, tapping the screen. "Predators often present as calm, collected—"
I muted the TV.
I wanted to yell at them that my heart had been trying to punch through my ribs. On the inside, I'd been pure panic wrapped in leather and cheap courage.
But the camera never cares about that part.
The name stuck everywhere.
On social media, the tag #MaskedCreep sat in the rotating list of trending topics. People wrote fake sighting threads. Horror story writers used me as inspiration for "don't walk home alone at night" posts.
Someone edited my usual streaming avatar into the shape of the Creep's outline and captioned it:
new lore just dropped
Hundreds of likes.
I closed the tabs, opened them again. Like a reflex.
Every trend, every meme, every panic served the same function: attention, focused and hot.
Some of it bounced off me-as-Michael. Mentions, jokes, DMs.
Most of it stuck to me-as-Masked-Creep. Fear, disgust, thrill.
I could feel both.
It was like standing between two mirrors that reflected different versions of me back and forth until I couldn't tell which one was real.
Around noon, my manager insisted we meet in person.
"I want to see your face when we talk," she said. "Harder to lie that way."
We picked a small café with decent coffee and loud music. Neutral territory. I wore a cap, mask, and sunglasses like some low-budget celebrity parody.
She waved me over when I walked in, laptop already open.
"You look like the Masked Creep's off-brand cousin," she said as I sat down.
"Thanks," I said. "Great start."
She pushed a cup of something warm toward me. "Drink. You look like you've slept about twenty minutes total."
"Thirty," I said. "I'm thriving."
She gave me that look that said she wasn't sure if she should worry more about my mental health or my upload schedule.
"Alright," she said, fingers tapping the side of her cup. "Numbers first. You're up on all fronts. Subs, views, mentions. The reaction stream did well, and most people are praising you for calling the video scary and telling people to be careful."
"That's the bare minimum," I said. "It's not exactly heroism."
"The bare minimum is shutting up and doing nothing," she said. "You did better than that. The charities noticed, by the way. They liked what you said. They're still interested in possible collabs."
Of course they were. Fear sold, then healing sold after.
"What about the brands?" I asked.
She grimaced.
"A couple of them put things on pause until 'this whole creep thing blows over'. They're skittish. They don't like risk. Others don't care at all; they just see higher engagement and think 'good timing'."
"Right," I said. "Nothing makes people want to buy snacks like a possible predator in their neighborhood."
She looked at me for a long second.
"You're angry," she said.
"I'm tired," I said. "And I don't like how quickly everyone decided who the monster is."
"We don't know he isn't," she pointed out.
"I know," I said.
She raised an eyebrow.
I stared into my cup.
Careful, idiot.
"I mean, we don't have context," I corrected. "We know exactly three seconds of alley."
She watched me another beat, then let it go.
"Anyway," she said, "we have to decide how much you lean into this for content."
"I don't want to," I said immediately.
Her expression didn't change, but I could almost hear the internal sigh.
"I figured. But listen," she said, leaning in a little, "you don't have to make it about him. You could do a series on street safety. Interview experts. Talk about bystander effect, consent, all that. Use the trend to redirect attention somewhere useful."
That… wasn't terrible, actually.
"I'll think about it," I said. "But I'm not making 'Creep Reacts to Creeps' a recurring thing."
"Perish the thought," she said wryly. "You can also do nothing. Let it blow over. But people are tagging you because they see you as the 'good man on the internet' guy. They want you to say something human when the world feels weird. That's value, whether you like it or not."
Human.
I wasn't sure that's how I'd describe the thing I'd become, but fine.
While she talked through possible PR routes, something else happened.
At the table next to us, two people had been arguing softly about something unrelated. Work, probably. Their voices blurred with the café's music.
Without meaning to, I glanced over.
Not at them, exactly. At the space between us.
My attention unfurled like a muscle stretching.
Their conversation faltered. Both of them, at once, looked our way.
The guy frowned, as if he'd forgotten what he was saying. The woman blinked, eyes lingering on me a second too long before flitting to my manager, then to the laptop, then back to me.
Other tables shifted too. A woman scrolling her phone paused. The barista behind the counter glanced up mid-steam.
The room's hum bent slightly around our corner.
I jerked my focus back to the manager, heart twitching.
The moment passed. Everyone resumed what they were doing.
She didn't seem to notice anything weird.
"Hey," she said, snapping her fingers in front of my face. "Stay with me. I know the idea of a media strategy makes your soul leave your body, but this is important."
"Right," I said. "Sorry. Just thinking."
"Don't do that, it's dangerous," she said. "Anyway. Bottom line: you can't control this story. It's not about you. Best you can do is be the calm voice reacting to it and not do anything stupid in real life."
That last part landed harder than she meant it to.
"Got it," I said.
We finished the meeting. No radical decisions, just a vague plan: keep streaming, maybe one dedicated video on safety, no panicky tweets.
As we stood to leave, I tested something small.
I brushed my attention over us like a hand closing a curtain. Not pulling eyes, but pushing them away.
Look somewhere else. We're not interesting. There's nothing to see.
The barista's head, which had been turning our way again, drifted to the other side of the room instead. The couple at the next table didn't glance up as we passed, even when my bag nearly brushed their chair.
For the first time, consciously, I had pushed attention away instead of pulling it in.
Both directions, then.
Call and cancel.
I stepped out into the street with my mind buzzing.
At home, I opened a fresh doc and started writing like I was making a game guide.
ATTENTION – Personal notes
Direct eye contact = strongest anchor.
Screens work too (videos, thumbnails, comments), but effect feels weaker and slower.
I can pull eyes toward something (boosting awareness).
I can push eyes away from something (making people ignore it).
Strong emotions attached to attention = stronger feedback in my body. Fear/anger thrill feel "hotter" than casual interest.
Live attention (being in the same space) feels way more intense than online.
I paused, fingers hovering over the keyboard.
More eyes = more power?
→ During streams, I feel physically sharper when viewership spikes.
→ During alley incident, when everyone looked at me at once, I moved faster, grabbed harder without thinking.
Writing it down made it more real. Less "maybe I'm crazy" and more "this is a system, learn it".
I thought of that word, system, and erased it. No need to jinx myself with gamer vocabulary.
Next line:
Attention can be wrong.
→ People believed worse of me because of the frame they saw.
→ Truth doesn't matter if no one looks at it.
That line sat there like a brick.
I stared at it for a long time.
If the truth didn't matter without attention, then maybe "truth" and "lie" weren't the right categories at all.
From the outside, the city didn't care about facts.
It cared about which story it was currently watching.
The bus stop beating had trended for a day.
The Masked Creep was on day two and still climbing.
If I wanted to help anyone, or save my own skin, I had to learn how to move inside that logic instead of fighting it from the edges.
I opened social media again and searched the tag.
Between the panic and the jokes, there were tiny, fragile posts.
I was cornered once on my way home, this stuff is bringing it all back. Please don't go anywhere alone right now.
Reminder: if you're drunk and someone insists on "helping" you somewhere quiet, say no. Ask staff instead.
Their likes were modest compared to the meme edits.
I focused on one of them. Read it three times. Let myself feel how important it was for people to see something like that in between the noise.
Then I pushed.
Not at the girl who wrote it. At the vague swarm of people scrolling through the hashtag, half-bored, half-afraid.
Look here. This matters. Click this one. Read this.
A few seconds later, the post's like count started to jump faster. Comments appeared.
This. Thank you.
Sharing this with my friends.
I tried the same with another post that said:
We don't know the full story in the video. Stay safe, but don't witch-hunt random dudes for wearing black.
That one got more pushback.
okay creep defender
this is how you get more victims
The anger stung, even though it wasn't directed at my visible face.
I felt it anyway.
Heat crawled along my arms.
I canceled the push, pulled my attention back, and sat there breathing hard.
"I can't just brute-force this," I muttered. "I'm not in charge of everyone."
But I had nudged things. Slightly.
The safety post reached more people than it would have. Some of them would walk home differently tonight because of it.
That counted for something.
At the same time, I could feel how easy it would be to become addicted to that feeling. To sculpt feeds, boost certain voices, bury others, all from behind a screen.
I closed the apps. Shut the laptop.
No more experiments for today.
The room hummed quietly.
Helmet on the chair. Jacket hanging from a hook. Bike key on the table.
Three components of a second life I hadn't fully stepped into, already haunting my first one.
That night, I didn't patrol.
I stayed inside, lights low, windows cracked open to let in city noise.
Police sirens flared and faded in the distance now and then. Somewhere below, someone laughed too loudly. A car bass thumped past.
I lay on the couch scrolling through channels, fingers hovering over the Masked Creep coverage and then skipping past it.
They didn't need my eyes anymore. They had plenty.
Instead, I watched a documentary about crowd psychology. Old footage of stadium panics, subway evacuations, people freezing in place when they should have run.
The narrator talked about "bystander effect," "diffusion of responsibility," all the terms my manager had thrown around earlier.
In almost every clip, the disaster began with people not looking where they should.
Eyes stuck to the wrong thing. A phone, a sign, their own shoes.
With a tiny push, that could change.
If I got good enough, I could redirect entire pockets of people away from danger before they even knew danger was there.
Or toward it.
That thought had slipped in quietly. I caught it as it passed and pinned it down.
I didn't like that it had arrived so naturally.
"Hero," I reminded myself. "That's what you wanted."
Chats calling me a hero had always felt like a game. A title like "king" or "goat" people threw around because it sounded nice.
But here, in the dark, with the city's noise leaking through my walls and my own notes open in a window, the word took on weight.
Hero meant choosing. Where to point attention. Who to help. Who to leave in shadow.
Villain meant doing the same thing for yourself.
Either way, it was the same power, just aimed in different directions.
I turned off the TV.
In the reflection on the black screen, my face hovered over the faint outline of the helmet on the chair.
Two versions of me. One still trying to do the right thing. One already being cast as a threat.
The world had given me a name I didn't want.
I couldn't erase it.
But maybe, if I learned fast enough, I could decide what The Masked Creep actually did, instead of leaving it to shaky camera angles and talk show hosts.
That was the line I drew for myself that night.
I didn't realize yet how easy it would be, later, to move that line.