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Deep in the island’s volcanic heart, the air hung thick with sulfur and damp stone. Green luminescence pulsed from moss clinging to the cavern walls, reflecting in Trisha’s eyes as she leaned against a jagged outcrop. Those eyes—now glowing an unnatural, venomous green—scanned the group chat on her phone. Nate’s boast about the "South Korean baddie," Kaori’s furious Japanese scolding followed by the dolphin story, Jade’s relentless food spam, Jason’s mundane question. Her lips, painted the same deep burgundy as always, curved into a cold smile devoid of amusement. Pathetic little meatsacks, she thought, savoring their oblivious chatter. They hadn’t noticed the absence of the real Trisha. Not yet.

She tapped the screen once, silencing it, and slid the phone back into her climbing shorts. Around her, things that weren't quite Trisha shifted in the oppressive gloom—Spooky Island Demons. The one closest flickered under the cave's dim bioluminescence: unnaturally tall and whip-thin, its posture perpetually hunched as if its long, gangly limbs were too heavy for its purple-sheathed frame. Sickly violet skin, darker and mottled along the bony ridge of its spine and over its shockingly prominent ribs, stretched tight, giving it the gaunt appearance of a starved corpse pulled upright. Its head was elongated, crowned by large, bat-like ears that curled backwards into points like wicked horns. Below them, its wide mouth glistened with the faint hint of jagged teeth, and the animating spark within the vessel leaked out through its eyes, twin pools of livid green fire burning with a predatory, ancient hunger in a face utterly too sharp and alien for comfort. Clawed hands clicked softly against the stone floor, each finger longer than a switchblade. The nectar that would draw flies to its rot.

"Entertaining?" rasped one demon, its voice echoing with the scrape of stone on stone. It gestured a limb that ended in too-long fingers toward her phone.

Trisha—the thing wearing Trisha—pushed off the wall with a predator’s grace, the sharp, airborne scent of impending rain mingling with the cave’s eternal damp rot. "A distraction," it declared, its borrowed voice harsh amidst the dripping stone and whirring machinery. "Nothing more than static." It paused, letting the sheer alien rhythm of its movements – too smooth, too fluid – contrast with the chamber’s crude, demonic chaos. "But they’ve arranged themselves with delightful convenience. Nate’s predictable blind lust. Jade’s easily sated hunger." …