PHILADELPHIA – A tight-knit group of high school friends was found dead last week after a young man abandoned their questline to attend college out of state, sources report.
“No matter how many times you see it, it never gets any easier,” said Florence Hughes, the detective assigned to the case. “Four young people—kids, really—cut down on the eve of adulthood, all because someone couldn’t be bothered to advance their questline before progressing too far into Sarah Lawrence College. It makes me sick.”
“Unfortunately, tragedies like these are extremely common among recent graduates, especially ones who don’t check in with their old buddies or fail to exhaust all their dialogue before unlocking Spring Semester,” continued Hughes. “People tend to take a fatalistic view of death after the fact, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. For some of these kids, staying in touch would have been as simple as a phone call every now and then. A text. An email. Leaving and then reloading the area to trigger Jackson’s new dialogue about breaking up with his high school girlfriend. With a little effort, all this could’ve been avoided. But I guess a little effort is too much for some people.”
News of the friend group’s unexpected death, whose members had known each other since middle school and reportedly survived the Covid pandemic as well as several doomed inter-group relationships, landed hardest amongst the teens’ parents.
“I’m not sure how to talk about it,” said Wendy Stalh, mother to Jackson Stalh, the friend group’s resident extrovert and chronic flake. “One day, you’re doing chores and going about your life, and the next, your only son is found ambiguously slumped against a tree twelve feet from the front door. At first, I thought he was taking a nap, he looked so peaceful. That’s when I noticed he was lootable. My world changed forever.”
“Jackson was a bright, kind young man,” continued Stalh. “Most days, he could be located just outside the Shaded Pizzeria, or at the entrance to Emily’s House if you’d already spoken to Emily and given her the Letter From Jackson. If Jackson’s so-called friend had been there to help fight off the roaming Gentleman Callers, he could’ve opened up a new dialogue that might’ve saved Jackson’s life, and earned him a summonable wingman for future romances. But it’s like my mother used to say, you can’t fix a broken heart with could-bes. I just hope those who knew him remember my Jackson as he was. A sweetheart. A goofball with big dreams. An optional encounter who drops Wadded Gum as well as the Mother’s Lament gesture when killed.”
The young man responsible for abandoning his friend group expressed regret for the way things turned out, but firmly denied any accusation of wrongdoing.
“Jesus, I was gone for, what, a month?” said Chris Lawton, a first-year at Sarah Lawrence College in New York— an unforgivable several hours’ drive from the group’s hometown of Philly. “How was I supposed to know they’d all die? I tried to keep up with them, I really did, but there’s only so many Jackbox nights I can take, and those guys were die-hard Joke Boaters anyway. I thought I’d try slowly disengaging, just for a little while, you know? But they kept sending me cryptic texts like ‘We miss you’ and ‘Meet me in the Old Ruins’, and it’s like, what old ruins? That’s nowhere on my map. I’m just supposed to intuit where you’ll be next and what gesture I need to perform for you to drop the Ring of Emily’s Favor? If I had that much time to waste, I’d be 100-percenting all my relationships.”
“It’s horrible, of course I regret leaving, and not just because now I’m locked out of the Best Man questline and some lore-important dialogue from Jackson,” continued Lawton, who states his college friends are more easygoing and prefer Quiplash. “I loved those guys. Jackson. Emily. The blonde one. I’m so sad they’re gone. I’m gonna miss you all so much. You said the bodies were lootable though?”
At press time, the young man had been convicted on four counts of manslaughter, with a judge expected to rule in the coming week as to whether his crimes are serious enough to warrant the state-sanctioned Age of Incarceration Ending.
