I wrote a story. It's called "Don't cry". It's an original, standalone story with an original cast, but it takes place in the setting of Silent Hill, which is a video game series. If you haven't played Silent Hill and don't know anything about it, I can imagine that certain nuances may be lost. The story still works that way, and you can still read it. But in case you want to understand the story a little better, I've written a short explanation of the Silent Hill setting for those of you who are here not because this is a Silent Hill story, but because it is a story that I wrote (hi, mom!)
This is about Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3. There are many more Silent Hill games, but I have been led to believe that they are not very good, and so I have decided to ignore them.
Read the story on Archive of Our Own
What is Silent Hill?
The games of Silent hill take place in a world that appears to be just like ours. Except in this one little seaside town in Maine, where, sometimes, when people go there, things get strange.
Every game has a new protagonist, and they don't always have anything to do with each other. They're just going through the town, looking for someone. One person is looking for his daughter, another is looking for his wife. Each of them finds the town to be full of thick fog and strange beings. None of them know why.
Silent Hill has three layers. There's the real world, where the town is just a town. There's the Fog World, where everything is foggy and monsters appear. And there's the Dark world, where the town itself changes appearance, labyrinths open up, and the monsters are more plentiful.
The way the town works isn't really explained, only implied, but it has a tendency to draw people in. Usually, the people you meet there are looking for someone. A mother, a daughter, a wife. They rarely find quite what they were looking for, not in the way they expected. They may come to realize that who they were looking for is long dead. They may realize they were the one who killed them. They may find people who look a lot like them, they may meet people who look like someone who lived long ago. Most of the time, they don't question it.
Silent Hill works with symbolism. All the monsters symbolise something regarding each their main character; their past, their fears, things they don't yet know or would rather forget. Things they're repressing. All of them see the town differently. It may be cold and barren, it may be gross and rusty, it may be a flaming inferno.
Depending on how you, as the player character, acts, you may get different endings. If you treat them well, they may learn and move on. If you ignore the past, they may go down a path to repeat it. If you treat them poorly, they may not make it through at all.
Now, it's Dave Schmidt's turn.