Work Text:
( Lights up to reveal INTERVIEWER and GOODIE center stage. GOODIE is sitting on a chair. INTERVIEWER is standing in front of her; at lights up, they set their phone on a tripod to film GOODIE. Throughout the scene, they move around the stage but are never intentionally in front of their phone’s camera.
GOODIE is in her twenties. She wears an open NEW YORK MILLENNIALS jersey and running shoes. Her overall look should call to mind the 1990s and early 2000s; to some degree she is trapped in the era she became a FINAL GIRL. She is disconnected from INTERVIEWER, although she is trying to be friendly to them. GOODIE is frustrated and out of sync with the world around her, though day-to-day she is just barely able to fit in.
INTERVIEWER is teens to late thirties. They wear a BLOODPOOL logo hat. They are genuinely trying to connect with GOODIE, excited to meet someone they admire, but fail to understand where she is coming from. INTERVIEWER is a fan, but GOODIE views them as something closer to a Fan.
For added pathos for the audience, INTERVIEWER can resemble a famous MILLENNIALS player like CHORBY SOUL, SCHNEIDER BENDIE, or PATTY FOX, though they are not actually this person and GOODIE would not recognize these people.)
INTERVIEWER
— And we’re filming. Before we really get into this, I just wanted to thank you so much for agreeing to this, since you’ve been pretty pointed about not doing interviews; the rest of the forum is going to go wild that I got a face-to-face discussion with the real Goodie for the franchise’s fifteenth anniversary, you know how fansites are.
GOODIE
(GOODIE mumbles something under her breath - loud enough for the audience to hear she’s said something, but not loud enough for them to understand what it was.)
INTERVIEWER
What?
GOODIE
You just reminded me of — it’s not important. Let’s get started.
INTERVIEWER
Alright. Let’s start this off with something simple, just to get it on the record. What’s your name?
GOODIE
Hi. I’m Goodie. Goodie McSriff, technically, but everyone knows me as Goodie from Bloodpool, or just Goodie Bloodpool. (She pauses.) Which is legally my name now, which I’m sure makes searching me specifically on the internet really fun. Sorry about that, everyone.
INTERVIEWER
And is there anything people might recognize you from?
GOODIE
I was the only survivor of the Bloodpool murders. Because I killed the serial killer with a blaseball bat. And then it turned out he wasn’t dead, and I had to kill him again after he broke into my apartment to get revenge six months later, and then I was really the only survivor of the Bloodpool murders.
INTERVIEWER
Which, for the enterprising among you viewers, you might remember as the events of Bloodpool and Bloodpool 2 —
GOODIE
( Cutting INTERVIEWER off.) Two.
INTERVIEWER
That’s what I said.
GOODIE
No, you were pronouncing it like the number 2. Like a 2-for-1. It’s pronounced like the Roman numeral? The intonation’s different.
INTERVIEWER
Oh, yeah, sorry. (Clears throat.) Bloodpool II. Is that it?
GOODIE
That’s it. They wanted to call it Bloodpool II: Time to Drown, but I told them that was — if you don’t mind me saying this — fucking stupid. You can bleep that out in editing if you want, it’s fine. Said that there wasn’t a pool for miles around the apartment complex; people were going to get the wrong idea.
INTERVIEWER
Really? In the opening sequence for II, there’s the whole transition from a bathtub to a pool that runs for almost 25 seconds, and at the end during the confrontation when he’s got the gasoline, there’s the pool in the background —
GOODIE
That last sequence, they added all that in during editing. It was a retention pond on the other side of the road. Covered with moss and pond scum, too. Incredibly gross. I don’t think I ever saw any animals there the entire time I was in that apartment.
INTERVIEWER
That’s wild.
GOODIE
II’s editing was a lot more... (thinking about how to put it) ...in-depth. I think it’s a pool now. It wasn’t a pool when I moved there, at least.
INTERVIEWER
I could keep asking you about that for a while, honestly, because you’ve just opened up some fascinating fields of discussion, but I think our future audience probably wants me to move on at least for now. Are you good to come back to this later?
GOODIE
Sure.
(BEAT.)
INTERVIEWER
(Clears throat.) So! Goodie, it’s been fifteen years since Bloodpool II — you’re looking youthful as ever! Haven’t aged a day. What’s your secret?
GOODIE
Would you believe me if I said “good living”?
INTERVIEWER
Unfortunately, no.
GOODIE
That’s fair. Would you believe me if I said the screen takes off fifteen pounds and five years?
INTERVIEWER
Again, unfortunately, nnnnokay - yeah. The thing is, yeah, it does do that, but that just makes the question more relevant, you know?
GOODIE
It’s a mixture of things. Good genetics, apparently, I didn’t really age much for the first few years; I still get carded these days, even. Makeup’s a big one, mostly because half the time people don’t know what plain makeup looks like.
INTERVIEWER
Anything else?
GOODIE
You might’ve noticed my jersey.
INTERVIEWER
I did. I thought it might be a little gauche to gawk, given your... history with blaseball bats.
GOODIE
It’s appreciated.
INTERVIEWER
So I’m going to guess you joined the splort for —
GOODIE
The sign-on perks, mhm. Even if you’re on reserve, as long as you’re on a roster, the only thing that can kill you...
INTERVIEWER
...is blaseball itself. I've seen that commercial too. Wish they'd stop airing it so much, not gonna lie. Anyway — is this a Bloodpool move, or a personal change?
GOODIE
...A personal change.
INTERVIEWER
No crossovers in our future, then? Or special editions?
GOODIE
No. No, there’s — there’s not.
INTERVIEWER
Well, New York’s a considerable change of pace from Indiana. Any reason you didn’t go for something a little closer to home, like the, uh, what are they called... the Ohio team? The Ohio Bugs. Something like that.
GOODIE
This is going to sound corny, but it was actually the Millennials’ slogan that really caught my eye. “Youth will save us. ” Youth didn’t fucking save me or any of my friends or anyone who lived on my floor. It’s not going to save anyone.
INTERVIEWER
Yeah, that would... I can definitely see how that’d hit a tender spot. That seems like a reason not to join them, though, which is clearly not what you went with in the end, unless you’re wearing that jersey as a fakeout. Can I ask why?
GOODIE
I got really angry about it, actually. And then I thought about it for a while and decided - at least they can say it like a threat. And the entire time I was setting up the appointment, I just kept thinking to myself, “Garcia and River would tease you about being a stupid little country mouse if they knew you were thinking about moving to New York City” . I’d never even been anywhere bigger than a million people. It wasn’t in character for me.
INTERVIEWER
Don’t you decide what’s in character for you?
GOODIE
You’d think that.
INTERVIEWER
I would, yeah.
GOODIE
Great! So would I. Do you know how often I get told I’m “not like the real Goodie” from the movies?
INTERVIEWER
Too often?
GOODIE
Too often. It’s — it looks better on screen when there’s a clear beginning and ending and everything has a consequence, everything has a callback, you learn from your experiences — it doesn’t feel like that. Mostly it feels like you’re going to die. And it just keeps on feeling like that even after - it just feels like that, forever.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve notoriously been, uh, super reticent about making any public appearances. Is that part of it?
GOODIE
Eight of my friends, including my best friend, fucking died in the span of a three-day weekend. I want you to imagine a world where they didn’t get all of that on film, and then I want you to think about that question again.
INTERVIEWER
...I'm sorry. That was, uh... I apologize.
(GOODIE gets up and begins to pace behind her chair.)
GOODIE
You know what’s in character for me? I don’t know that either. Rewatching the second movie feels like being in hell. Half of it I can remember, and the half of it I want to point at the screen and go “it didn’t happen like that”. I wasn’t that brave. I mostly just remember crying, and screaming, and after I cut his head off it took me an hour to let go of the axe.
It’s the little things, right? I was — I came home that day and I remember I was wearing these stupid little mismatching knit socks I’d bought the day before. They had little cityscapes on them, and I’d bought them at the farmer’s market from this nice couple who also sold handmade dog toys. And I opened my apartment door, and I walked in, and I thought to myself “I don’t think that blood will wash out of my socks”. And it’s probably a deleted scene, or — something? Maybe I’m dreaming? But I almost remember just standing there. Just this long, panning shot of the guy from the next apartment’s body on my living room floor, bleeding on the hardwood, and I just stood there. I’d never talked to him, I didn’t even know whose dead fucking body was in my apartment, it was just some random guy.
INTERVIEWER
That sounds really rough. I’m sorry.
GOODIE
The girl who starred in III? Lottie? She called me bawling her eyes out from the hospital the day it happened to her. She said she didn’t know what to do or what was happening, she’d woken up with an IV in and the director had asked her if she wanted to call anyone before they got a trailer put together. She had to drown her killer in the YMCA’s swimming pool with a broken arm. He’d seen the first two movies and wanted to - I don’t even know, okay? It fucks you up. She wanted to know if I had any advice about being a Final Girl and all I could tell her was “it’s going to happen again, and you’re not going to know when, and you’re never going to be safe again, and neither is anyone your life touches”.
Blaseball can’t be any worse than that. At least with blaseball, there’s a specific set of circumstances someone can die under. Other things can hurt me, but they can’t... even if he comes back from the dead and garrotes me while I’m sleeping, as long as I’m on the roster, I’ll be fine eventually. There’s a kind of—
INTERVIEWER
It’s a sense of safety and certainty, I get it. On the other hand, though, you can’t run from games, can you?
GOODIE
Getting incinerated doesn’t leave your blood all over the field or horrifically traumatize any of your friends who see it. Not any more than you dying suddenly and unexpectedly does, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
And the uniforms are good in blaseball. (Realizing something) Oh, my god, I am so sorry, I completely lost track of my questions. I promise I was initially prepared for this. Okay! Okay. You mentioned editing?
GOODIE
...I did. Okay. Bloodpool is basically raw footage, mostly? There’s cuts for time, they airbrushed out Yulia’s acne, and they added music, but it’s mostly raw. It was the middle of summer, we were a bunch of high schoolers who got to spend the week at our rich friend’s mansion while his parents were out of town, and it was in one of those fancy little gated communities called Bloodpool. And he snapped, or - something, and decided it was a great use of his life to disable everyone’s electronics, lock the grounds, lock the mansion, and put on a stupid mask, and murder us all with a lot of knives.
INTERVIEWER
That’s the plot of Bloodpool, yeah. Got it in one.
GOODIE
He didn’t even like me that much. I was a plus one.
INTERVIEWER
(Laughing) That’s kinda fucked up! Like, it worked out in your favor, but -
GOODIE
(Laughs) Not really! (Moving on before the horrible gravity can really sink in.) For Bloodpool II, they really wanted to get more cinematic and do some more storytelling with it - which was apparently surprisingly difficult, given it basically all happened over the course of about six hours and he and I didn’t know where each other were for five and a half of them.
INTERVIEWER
Making it either the fourth or first worst night of your life, as I understand it.
GOODIE
Pretty much. First worst, personally, because having all my worst neuroses confirmed really didn't help that much in the whole 'being a human being' thing. There’s some more ambitious CGI, like the whole pool bit, but they actually recut a lot of the final chase so it’d seem like it was longer than it was, because it was just... it was me, and him, and an empty road at two in the morning, and I guess the time I bashed his head in really affected him, because he didn’t check my backpack for the axe. It was five minutes and it was a lot and it was horrible and then it was—
INTERVIEWER
Over?
GOODIE
Fuck, you wish it was over. It’s never over. Not for final girls. Everyone wants their chance to make people like me give up our pretty little trauma trophy of surviving.
INTERVIEWER
You can’t be saying that people seriously want to kill you, right? I know fans can be a little much, but—
GOODIE
You should see my fanmail.
INTERVIEWER
If it’s all the same to you, uh, I really don’t think I’d want to.
GOODIE
Smart.
INTERVIEWER
So, why agree to an interview now, of all times? Especially from a Bloodpool fanforum and not, you know, someone who actually has done this in their life, ever.
GOODIE
Again, it’s going to sound stupid, but—blaseball.
INTERVIEWER
I’m not following.
GOODIE
My teammates made an effort to actually get to know me as a person. It helps. When I brought up I was thinking about an interview, they actually suggested it should be someone like you, mostly because you'd give a shit if you thought you were hurting my feelings. It also helps that at the end of the last season we all thought we might explode.
INTERVIEWER
And that’s related to the giant microphone in the sky, right? It was pretty hard to miss that whole year.
GOODIE
(Tense laughter) It did eat twenty-four people, yes. Less messy than a real murder and a lot more inconclusive! You don’t even get anything to blame aside from maybe god and maybe the Fans! (Clearly very frustrated) What’s more exciting than people you don’t even know deciding who gets to die?
INTERVIEWER
Hey, uh— Goodie. Are you good to take a fifteen-minute break? I don’t—
GOODIE
Fine. Okay. Fine. That — that’s probably a good idea. Sorry. I just need — a minute. I—
(INTERVIEWER stops the recording on their phone and steps around to be within arm’s-length of GOODIE.)
INTERVIEWER
I’m not asking you to explain yourself. I’ll go... I’ll go get you some water. I didn’t mean to bring it up. Do you want fruit punch? Tea? I’ve got a lot of drinks.
GOODIE
...Fruit punch is fine.
( INTERVIEWER exits STAGE LEFT. GOODIE watches them go and then pulls a KNIFE out of her pocket, clutching it tightly. She looks at it for a long moment and then drops it on the floor.
LIGHTS FADE TO BLACK as GOODIE buries her face in her hands.)