A Hint of Serendipity

A Hint of Serendipity is a Web Original work.

Meet Zero. Former Sage in the battle against Slender Man and One of Us, as self-professed gamer and fan of the Mega Man series. You can start reading the blog here. Zero started his blog before he was ever haunted by Slender Man, but still was a true Agent Mulder about the situation from the very beginning. He eventually had the torch passed to him by Robert Sagal. Held a one man stand in his house while Slender Man and his hordes laid siege to him starting from late November to the Winter Solstice.

In this time, he engaged in frequent Foe Yay with the Ax Crazy Rika, an young, attractive female agent sent to kill him. This Entry contains a particularly humorous example.

He eventually, alongside the guys from Observe and Terminate and from various other blogs, made a Last Stand on the Winter Solstice in an attempt to fascilitate a Follow the Leader situation in which bloggers write how the story ends with Slender Man being injured and weakened. This was a massive Batman Gambit between himself and several others. It didn't work.

He's back, and now an Ax Crazy Knight Templar. His new blog can be found here: The Last Refuge of a Dangerous Man: http://fateworsethandeath.blogspot.com/

Tropes used in A Hint of Serendipity include:

• Agent Mulder: Before ever being haunted himself, Zero still believed the myth was true.
• And I Must Scream: Zero at one point considers that Slender Man also infects the afterlife and that even the dead can't escape him.
• Apocalyptic Log: The entire last entry is basically Zero's Last Will and Testament to the slendering community at large. Not marked as a spoiler, because this trope goes with the territory.
• Ax Crazy: Rika. Full stop. Her expy was just as bad.
  • Now, Zero as well. He's already promised to go on a killing spree against those he believed failed him.
  • It's worse than that. He thinks he can sacrifice Runners to create a weapon.
• Badass: Zero. If you've read the above and The Determinator entires on this article, then you know why Zero is a undisputed badass almost on the same level as Seeking Truth's Zeke Strahm when it comes to dealing with Slender Man.
• Back from the Dead: Nessa. Though she had her own blog, her presence post-resurrection happened primarily on Zero's blog.
• The Blank: Yep.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Zero. He's been mind screwed by Slender Man and something called The Bleeding Tree into thinking that he can create a weapon that can defeat Slendy if he sacrifices enough Runners to it.
• Bunny Ears Lawyer: Zero was quite a light-hearted, quirky fellow who found humor and irony in a great many situations where others might have gone mad.
  • Possibly subverted since some of his antics were him stepford smiling to keep from curling up into a corner and crying.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Subverted in that it turned out to really be Nessa who was tormenting him after her resurrection, but the intention and effect were the same: to break Zero and the other bloggers.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose In Life: The entire summary of both blogs.
• The Determinator: Zero. Just Zero. The man plunged into the fight for survival head first and never looked back. He and some other bloggers came up with a plan and he fought tooth and nail to stay alive to that point and succeeded despite Slender Man deciding to get serious about killing Zero. Let that sink in for a while.]]
• Downer Ending: It's the Slender Man mythos. You expected anything less? Only it's not his fault it ended badly this time. It's our fault for not wishing Slender Man to be defeated.
  • Subverted for a while, but as all things in the Mythos, it found its way back here.
• Fallen Hero: Zero. Big time.
• Gallows Humor: Zero's comments on other blogs as well as his own writing has a pretty high level of this, especially after his BSoDs.
• Humanoid Abomination: Uh-huh.
• Hero-Killer
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Zero's trusty Katana. Crosses over with Katanas Are Just Better.
• Heroic BSOD: Twice in late November after redlight took over White Elephants and Nessa was hallowed and then killed.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Zero knew he would not survive the planned attack on the Solstice and made preparations for that fact. Then he still plunged unrelentingly ahead once he got dangerous with the plan anyway for the purpose of giving his comrads everywhere else in the world a fighting chance.
• Horror Doesnt Wait For Simple Tuesday: The Solstice Gambit in particular, however most large events in his life occured on either an Equinox or a Solstice
• Insane Troll Logic: Again, Zero. He's convinced that harvesting bones of Runners who have reached the end of their rope and are on the verge of being proxied is the answer to defeating Slender Man. The source of this "revelation"? A vision of a bleeding tree which he saw after the failed Solstice Assault while still deep in Slender Country while being mind screwed by Slender Man.
• Knight Templar: Zero. He's become convinced that he has to kill a certain number of people about to be proxied to forge a tool to defeat Slender Man. His current hit list is any poor soul at the end of their rope unfortunate enough to cross paths with him.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: When Nessa actually met with Zero, confirming that she had been resurrected, he gave her to Redlight to give her the same treatment he had given Robert.
• Left Hanging: Very debatable, but some people insist that since Zero's body was never found that he may still be alive out there and that it's not over for A Hint of Serendipity yet.
  • Eventually averted by the second blog, which picks up after a Missing Episode
• Mood Whiplash: This post, which is mentioned as a Crowning Moment of Funny on The Slender Man Mythos main page, begins with Zero waking up staring at himself in a mirror and realizing that he has apparently tried to slit his wrists in his sleep. Later whiplashes right back again in the comments section, as Nessa is slowly hallowed.
• My God, What Have I Done?: When Zero kills Slice, who admired him. That doesn't stop him from continuing his killing spree, of course.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: One might say all this misfortune could've been averted if Greenlight had not picked him as a successor. His legacy issues may never have taken hold of him.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Zero has severe doubts that giving Nessa to Redlight was the right thing to do, but he considers it the only option he had.
• Now What?: the question was asked in a different speech tense in this entry. The context is more like Then What, but that's a different trope altogether.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Zero's current setting. He believes that the bloggers have betrayed him.
• Sanity Slippage: Heavily. The man was almost hallowed out and turned into a proxy twice during his heroic BSODs, but came back both times, subverting this, at first...
  • Then things got really trippy when he started hallucinating little green monsters.
    • Now the Sanity Slippage has progressed into a full-on split personality Zero is both Remnant and Zerosage, and he's ready to hack and slash all the runners to get rid of Slender Man.
• Shout-Out: Among other things, he finishes up his last blogpost with the word "bang."
  • Also, the "Everything you ever..." post is a horrible example.
• Shut UP, Hannibal: In this entry he does this to Rika at the end.
• The Siege: The man boarded up his home and held off Slender Man, his minions, and the effects of being haunted for nearly a full month with the express purpose of surviving to the Solstice to enact his plan.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Zero stayed willfully on the optimistic side of things to the (very) bitter end. By the end, it was the only way for him to keep his sanity.
  • It's gone cynical more recently.
• Spiritual Successor: For a while, when he still prescribed by Robert's Core Theory.
  • In fact, if a certain Alternate Character Interpretation about Robert is to be believed, that Robert lied to the slendercommunity about the knife to instill a sense of hope and positivity thus hopefully weakening Slender Man (a plot not dissimilar to Zero's own Solstice scheme), then perhaps Zero and Robert really aren't so different after all.
• Split Personality: It turns out remnant and Zerosage are both Zero...or what's left of him, though he insists they're just personas, and he's well aware of his mood swings
• Unreliable Narrator: His photobucket suggests that he may have killed Amelia.
• That Man Is Dead: Yes, we would say that the Zero of A hint of serendipity is gone if Remnant and Zerosage are anything to go on.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Just take a look at the comments section of Stalked. He called his fellow bloggers a joke and mocked their various attempts to get organized and defeat Slender Man despite having taken part in a failed attempted, himself. He also mocks them for taking exception to him murdering a girl who was about to be proxied but was still sane enough to beg for his help, saying that before they would have applauded him for doing that.
• Wham! Episode: Late November. If you've read the main entry on The Slender Man Mythos and White Elephants, then you know Slender Man launched multiple and continuous attacks in light of the levels of optimism Robert's theories had brought to the blogs. Heroic sacrifices, deaths, insanity, heroic blue screens of death, face heel turns, heel face turns, and despair were happening everywhere (except on The Tutorial where M was oddly sparred) and Zero had his above mentioned breakdowns.
  • It was the arrival of redlight and the death of Nessa that were the things that got to him the most.
    • His return.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Invoked on a meta level. Had all the readers and other participants wished so, Zero's plan to weaken the Slender Man by having everyone willing him weakened would have worked. Alas, we're all just here for Slendy. We loves our paranoia-causing abomination! Yes, we do!
  • Now Zero has returned, called us on it, and wants our heads for it!
    • More recently, bloggers have called him on his more recent actions right back.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: A recent entry talking about how much he misses Amelia was immediately met with proclamations of sympathy and hugs from the bloggers despite his recent murders and attempted murders of several different Slenderstalked.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Natch.