Her eyes were shut tight but Kayla couldn’t get the burned images out of her head. Images from dreams that had been assailing her through countless sleepless nights. She tossed and turned a few more times and threw the covers off of her in desperation. The charging dock on her nightstand read out a measly nineteen percent charge, just enough for a late night chat with Sid. Kayla took the Templ off of the glowing pad and hooked it over her ear.
“Sid, are you up?”
“I am now.” Sid’s voice was half groggy and half annoyed. He was hamming up both feelings to let Kayla know that the conversation was strictly one of courtesy.
“I just know I’m going to have that dream again if I fall asleep.” She heard a beep from the other end as Sid’s Templ switched from speaker to earpiece mode.
“Kayla, you can’t let this sort of thing control your life like this. I used to have those same exact dreams but you never saw me calling you every other night over it.”
“I know, but-”
“Just install that app i showed you and leave your Templ on overnight. Sure, it took a few weeks before I didn’t need it anymore, but just think of the feature as a way out when things get too scary.” Sid had discovered an app that recognizes distress signals in the brain and wakes you up out of nightmares. It was popular among kids who suffered from Traumatic Nightmare Syndrome.
	“My parents won’t buy the new self charging model. They fell for those Brain Drain scare articles. So my battery’s always almost dead by the end of the day.” Kayla hoped that her new part time job would let her get one of her own before she graduated in 2035.
“Hah, you’d think that after the name change to Foxbook, our folks would finally move onto a site that doesn’t try to dodge regulation so much.” Sid was trying to change the subject. Maybe if Kayla could forget what was bothering her, she might actually have a peaceful night’s rest.
“But Peppa Pig? The Joker from that old Batman movie from, like, thirty years ago? That’s the weirdest part!” So much for that plan. And what’s worse is that it’s going to bring the images back to Sid’s mind too. It had to be fake. Spiderman and Elsa sort of made sense when you think about how terrible Kingdom Hearts 4 was, but Sid was pretty sure that Disney didn’t own Peppa Pig or anything from the DC Universe.
“Kayla! You’ve got to quit going on those creepypasta channels! That’s what’s giving you the nightmares!” Sid was growing more and more exasperated as the conversation wore on. It felt like he and Kayla had gone over this exact same conversation a dozen times by now.
“But someone finally got a hold of an old Youtube server from an auction and found one of the videos! They’re real! I saw it myself! Here, I’ll send it to you.” Sid had had enough by now. He wasn’t going to watch some crappy fan video from a Betabase meme that had gone on for too long.
“Don’t send me that video. As a matter of fact, delete it if it’s as creepy as you say you remember.”
	“Oh, it is! Just watch it, I swear!” Sid heard the all-too-familiar tone and slid the screen out from his Templ to just in front of his eyes. For the next ten minutes, a crudely animated video of a pregnant Peppa Pig played out. It seemed that the parents were Elsa and Spiderman via some weird old in vitro procedure. It’s period accurate, at least. But when Peppa Pig went to the maternity ward, the procedure turned into a root canal that lasted for about half the video’s length. The pig’s teeth were strangely photo realistic and his screams sounded like some old garbled audio of a baby crying. He couldn’t finish it.
“Thanks for the nightmares. Now I have to activate that app again.” Sid was about to hang up.
“But this proves it, right?” Sid’s anger melted into something somewhere between sympathy and pity. Kayla was desperate for answers. As disturbing as this video was, resolving a question that robbed her of so many nights might be just what she needs.
“I don’t know and I’m too tired to think about it, to be honest. Yeah, the CG is bad to give it that retro look, but by the teens the tech was way better and-” Sid stopped himself.
“I thought you would shrug me off. Sorry for waking you up in the first place.” Kayla’s voice was low with dejection and a hint of anger.
“Kayla, wait. Maybe it was some made-for-tv special. They had some weird stuff on TV at the time. This was probably a little after those weird old Adult Swim shows were so popular with our parents. Maybe Disney tried to break into the adult cartoon business too. It would make sense that they would try to cover it up considering how disturbing it all is.” Half of the rationalization was pulled from his ass but the other half was actual reasoning out. Didn’t Youtube have copyright protection back in the day? You wouldn’t think that a company in its prime would let something so amateur slip through its algorithms. And the date puts it right around when the FCC started cracking down with the Neural Laws of 2020.
“Oh, that makes perfect sense! That’s gotta go up on the official Creepypasta Betabase page. Thanks for listening and helping to sort this stuff out!” On Sid’s end, he heard a beep to indicate the end of the call. He felt happy for Kayla getting some satisfactory answers but he knew there was no way on earth that he was going to get any rest that night.