The Tourist

Beware of who you pick up on the road. Obvious, I know. But I'm not just talking about your average stranger danger. Because in this case, the danger may not be herself, but her unhinged curiosity. A curiosity that could bring your existence to an end. 
You can find her on multiple roads, asking for a ride. Her location is always changing. Her investigations demand it. You can easily identify her clothing. She looks like a victim, wearing rags for clothes, all patched up with fabric she stole on her travels. Long, messy hair that hasn't been cut in ages, decorated with sticks, leaves and dirt. Her body, hardly visible due to her baggy clothes, is skin and bones. Her care for food is very little, rather, she spends her small amount of money on other things she considers more important, such as cameras, pencils, notebooks, lanterns, bandages, and whatever else is necessary for her investigations. God knows the bandages are important. 
Her skin is covered in bruises and scars, all from her little adventures with the supernatural. Maybe it's because of her dangerous lifestyle that she's so nervous all the time. Almost always trembling, her odd eyes frantically move around. Her face is decorated with an unsteady smile. The Tourist character is anxious at all times. It's the demeanor you would expect from someone who has suffered. Someone vulnerable. And that attracts people. For better or for worse, whatever motive there may be. Whether they want to help her or take advantage of her, someone always picks her up. Which may eventually get them to their doom.
Give her some food or clothes and she may show what hides inside her backpack. It may seem normal at first, and on the outside, it is. Just a regular backpack any other traveler would wear. But on the inside lies objects of fear. Things that she got from her 'tours'. All sorts of items: video game copies, lost episodes, doodled pages, cursed songs, evidence of inexplicable things. All of them are kept inside her bag and archived in one of her endless collections of notebooks. She has dedicated her life to this. She has no friends, no known family and overall, no real identity. Her perception of herself is nothing but a tourist of the macabre, who takes photos and souvenirs. But these things have a cost. And she is willing to pay for them, no matter what it takes.
If you try to chat with her, then you’ll find she’s actually friendly. Even if she's anxious, she will smile at you, try to make jokes, be your friend, at least for the ride. She will never be mean, and she’ll be interested in whatever you have to tell her and won’t hesitate to answer your questions. She'll be nice all the way in the car, and all the rest of the times you see her on the off chance that you catch her again. After all, she has no reason not to be. But never mistake her actions as caring. Even if she tries to be your friend, you will never come first ahead of her one real devotion: the anomalies of the world. She has read billions of stories that claim to be real, none of them nice. Her obsessive love for them dominates her life. She wants to know all about them. Are they real? What are their limitations? Is it possible to survive them? are just some of the questions that float around in her head every time she reads. The answers are precious to her. She travels the world searching for resolutions, damaging her body, clothes, and companions in the process. And if you pick her up, you be included in her three essential sacrifices. 
On the road, the Tourist searches for her newest guinea pig. The one who will pay for her souvenirs. She'll ask you to come with her, to get out of the car for a second or two. She'll always have an excuse for this: "I n-need to pee but I'm sc-scared of going alone", "I have to p-pick up something, w-wanna co-come?", "D-Don't you wanna t-take a break from d-driving?" She'll ask you whatever she thinks will get you out of the car and straight to the place she was actually traveling to, whatever it is. A forest with a strange set of stairs, perhaps, or an unexplored cave, an odd store, or even a weird hole. Be sure to be careful. If you're lucky, you'll get a fake story. The Tourist will take note of that and disappear from your life forever, going to her next location. But if you're not…then your days are over. You have found the end of your life with an unbelievable existence. There's nothing you can do but watch as the fire of your life gets extinguished. Watch with the corner of your eye how she observes you, like this is some sick class she has to take notes for. She'll maybe even capture your last moments in a photo, those horrible last few seconds of your life being documented in an improvised library no one's ever gonna read. You'll forever be known as the one who disappeared during a road trip, your body lost forever.
While unsuspected, this situation is quickly avoidable; just by staying in your car, you're safe from her consequential cruelness. But if she doesn't ever ask you to come outside, you may have entered a worse hell than the previous one. At least the previous option is relatively fast, cut and dry - you'll follow her to a second location, find an inexplicable horror, and die at the hands of it, in nothing but a few hours. The second alternative can go for days, months, even. It is a long process of observation. She'll stalk your every move without your knowledge. Search for cameras, microphones, anything that could indicate that someone's been in your house. Beg not to find anything, because if you don't, you are free. Whatever she did was not real. It didn't work and she has no more interest in you. But if you do, pray for mercy. She's now the least of your problems. Something else is also stalking you, something notable. A monster, probably. It will have its own methods of tormenting your life, until you eventually die. Nothing is going to help you now. Your days are meticulously calculated by whatever this is. You can search for it online, try to identify what she's seeking for, but it's unlikely you can stop it; it's never happened before. But knowing the sickness can help grow over it. At least, a doctor told me that once. 
After you are terminated, she will go back inside your house. The Tourist will reclaim the cameras and microphones. She'll steal what is useful from your possessions. What used to be your things: money, nursery kits, electronic devices, things she will eventually need. She'll take inexplicable things, too; her souvenirs. She may even find a way to steal police material if required. She'll save all these things in her backpack, take pictures of everything, and note things down in her notebooks. Everything the mics recorded will be passed through to them. To the world, you are just some mysterious crime, maybe even a suicide. But for the Tourist, for the one who put you through all of this, you will always be one of the many subjects of her experimentation, a note in her travel diary, a souvenir that she'll show to the next poor soul that picks her up on a lonely road. 
So beware of who you pick up on the road. Not only because they may kill you, kidnap you, torture you, or whatever other danger humanity can conjure up, but because you may be put in even bigger danger. All to fill her gruesome curiosity. Because you may be the coin that she'll pay the tour with.
Category:Beings
Category:Places
Category:Weird