Towel always required a response.
* * *
—
Chloe and I sat side by side on my couch and shared an enormous caprese salad while we looked into the current status of the game. If Rabbits really was broken, and Alan Scarpio felt like I might be able to help fix it somehow, we needed to find out exactly what the hell was going on.
Chloe was scrolling through a couple of references in the comments section of a weird YouTube video when she uncovered a website she thought might be something.
* * *
—
Like Fight Club, the number one rule when it comes to Rabbits is: You don’t talk about Rabbits. Period. The result of this intense secrecy is that it’s fairly difficult to find information about the game online, and even if you’re experienced at seeking out Rabbits-related material, most of what you dig up will be either untrue or distorted enough to be completely useless.
There are whispers of severe retribution for players who talk about Rabbits publicly—retribution that includes extreme hacking, swatting, doxxing, and worse. According to the rumors, marriages have been destroyed, people sent to prison, and immense fortunes lost.
* * *
—
Chloe was the best online researcher I knew. From breaking into her high school’s computer system and “adjusting” grades in order to make a little extra lunch money to helping her college friends hack their significant others’ passwords to see if they’d been cheating, Chloe had a remarkable knack for navigating the hidden corners of the virtual world. If there was Rabbits information hidden out there between the cracks, Chloe had a pretty good chance of unearthing it—and covering our tracks after the fact.
It didn’t take her long to find something.
“Check it out,” she said, flipping her laptop around to show me the screen.
The title of the website was: Rabbits Players X.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Not sure. Looks like random pictures.”
She was right. The website was just the title and a group of seemingly unrelated photographs. Directly below the photographs was a blank input form with a send button.
“Is this legit?” I asked.
“A bunch of people on YouTube and Reddit have been trying to put together a full list of players officially involved in the last iteration of the game. This is their latest lead, but so far they haven’t been able to crack it.”
I took a look at the pictures. There was a flower in the middle of a field, some kind of old Bavarian or other German town, a looped rope, and a photograph of a smiling thirtysomething Black man holding a Canadian flag.
Apparently the Reddit folks had tried to endsource both the Web page’s form and send buttons, and then they’d put every image on that Web page through a number of queries, reverse image searches, and a process Chloe referred to as a social media combthrough, but they hadn’t been able to find any obvious link between the images.
I found it in less than a minute.
There was a connection between the photographs—but a tenuous, distant connection that most people would miss. The flower was a Collie rose. The town was located in central Thuringia, Germany: Apolda, the birthplace of the Doberman pinscher. The looped rope was a bit trickier. “Looped” is an anagram for “poodle.” The image of the man holding the Canadian flag might have been tough, but with the other clues already trending in such an obvious direction, it was easy. The man was a professional boxer named Trevor Berbick.
Boxer, collie, Doberman, poodle. The key was dogs.
We tried a few things, but in the end it was the word “canine” that led us to another Web page. That page displayed an image, what appeared to be some kind of screen capture of a list of usernames.
It didn’t feel like we were any closer to figuring out what was going on with Alan Scarpio, but it was still exciting to see the names （or pseudonyms） of official Rabbits players up there on the screen. If we hadn’t opened a door into the world of Rabbits, we might have at least lifted up the corner of a rug.
There were a few names that would have been familiar to anybody with even a passing interest in Rabbits: Intrepid23, Sadie Palomino, The Wrecking Crew, and the controversial player who had allegedly almost won both Nine and Ten—the merciless clue hunter known only as Murmur.
While I was writing all of the names from that list down in a journal so we might refer to it later, I noticed another handle I recognized: MorganaLaPhazer69.
I stared at that username for a long time, but there was no mistaking the handle and its unique spelling. I knew exactly who it was, although I couldn’t imagine him having anything to do with Rabbits.