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| “ | Someone, a young woman, in the general confusion, bumps into [Rosie]. She falls to the ground, not moving. [Rosie] then proceeds to leap towards every person she is able to. She touches them and each one ends up the same way. After touching about four more people, for a brief second, she looks in the direction of the camera, grinning widely. | „ |
| ~ The narrator while recapitulating the end of a viral video featuring Rosie. |
Rosie is the main antagonist of the 2017 creepypasta A Game of Tag. She's a mysterious young woman who quickly becomes infamous online for wandering around public areas and touching people, causing them to painfully die of a mysterious illness. Her signature is the green hoodie she always seems to be wearing while performing these acts.
Appearance[]
Rosie is a rather tall and seemingly 20-something woman with fair skin, a slender frame, and long black hair that obscures part of her face. Though most of her apparel isn't explicitly described in the story, whenever portrayed by her author, Cainmak, she's usually portrayed with sweatpants that are either black, blue, or dark gray, and with white sneakers on her feet. Her most infamous piece of clothing, which acts as her calling card, is a thick green hoodie she usually wears with the hood up. She's also notorious for having a wide and sadistic grin on her face whenever she's killing people.
Biography[]
The story starts with the narrator recounting a popular 2017 YouTube video that first brought Rosie to the attention of the mainstream public and major media outlets. It begins with people in a big city running and screaming, panicking and rushing to escape an unknown threat. Nineteen seconds later, Rosie enters the frame of the video, kicking off her killing spree with a confused fifty-something man, touching him and causing him to collapse spasming on the ground with bloodshot eyes, his face rapidly blistering and his chest grotesquely swelling. When everyone can see where the source of the panic is from, they start forming wide berths to get as far away from Rosie as they can, and police begin arriving in droves.
Rosie then walks towards a group of teenage boys and touches one of them, causing him to start choking as he begins bleeding from his mouth and his chest swells up to a horrific size. This causes the other two boys to panic and attempt running away, one of whom Rosie quickly nabs and causes to meet the same fate, causing the third boy to emit an incredibly loud cry. A young woman accidentally bumps into Rosie in the confusion and falls to the ground, unmoving. Then Rosie finally begins bolting at high speed toward everyone she can reach, claiming four more lives as she does, and the video ends with her briefly looking towards the camera with a wide and sadistic smile on her face. The narrator then brings up how the video quickly brought Rosie to the attention of the widespread public, with her having completely disappeared after the video surfaced.
It's never discovered how she managed to spread her deadly illness amongst the people, with the media theorizing it as a terrorist attack committed either with a poisonous gas or a hidden syringe, despite neither item showing up at all in the video. Medical examinations and autopsies eventually start to uncover symptoms such as skin lesions, obstruction of the lungs, and retinal inflammation. Eventually, the cause of death is determined to be asphyxiation caused by severe pulmonary injuries, which is revealed on an online message board by an anonymous morgue attendant whose supervisor had ordered them not to tell anyone as to prevent panic from spreading. They also add that aflatoxins heavily contributed to the victims' deaths, expressing their shock over how quickly the victims had been killed, having been exposed to dosages twenty times larger than in normal poisoning cases and suffering symptoms such as throat injuries, internal bleeding, and dermatitis. As for the original video, it blows up further and further in popularity on YouTube, garnering multiple reaction videos and theories regarding Rosie, with many believing that she was a botched experiment made by the government, that she was a real-life SCP, or even that she was Pestilence of the Four Horsemen. At this time, she becomes a viral meme online and garners a cult following, earning the nickname "Rosie" from the nursery rhyme Ring Around the Rosie, which is based on the Black Death.
The narrator, however, remembers a video of her having been taken in Japan and posted on YouTube in 2011, being titled "DEATH on the Streets Japan WEIRD GIRL Found???" when translated to English. The recording is taken from the third floor balcony of an unidentified building, depicting a suburban intersection. People can be seen running in terror as Rosie stands in the middle of the street, surveying her surroundings and keeping her hands in her pockets, her hood up and obscuring her face. What's especially notable is that she is surrounded by bodies in the video, standing in the middle of them for two minutes before leaving just as the police begin arriving. Because the incident hadn't received nearly the same amount of media coverage as the 2017 killing spree, the video had been deemed fake by the internet and largely forgotten about until then. This convinces the narrator to go to Reddit and create a subreddit for the girl to see if any more information concerning her can be uncovered, posting to the subreddit asking if anyone had seen her before.
Two days later, a response comes from someone who claims to have seen Rosie about two to three years prior, having been on their phone and sitting on a park bench while waiting for a friend of theirs when a girl wearing a green hoodie passed by, whom the person claims only to remember for the wide smile she had on her face, which they found cute. A few minutes later, they heard a scream, and when they responded to it, they found an older gentleman on the ground with a beet-red face and a swollen chest, prompting them to call 911 in a panic. They end the response claiming that they'll go insane if Rosie turns out to be the girl that passed by them that day, as she could have easily given them the touch of death as well. The narrator's post continues to gain more and more replies, with one in particular depicting a blurred photograph of two dead horses with swollen barrels and red patches all over their fur. The photographer tells a story about how in 2012, they had been at their family farm in France when they found the two mares dead and called a vet to do an autopsy. Their death certificate went on to claim that they had died of asphyxiation from exposure to black mold, despite there being none around the farm, and they would go on believing for years that the mares had eaten something toxic until the YouTube video in 2017, which astounded them due to the people in it dying with extremely similar symptoms.
The photo disgusts and further terrifies the public due to its revelation of the fact that Rosie has no problem with killing animals in such a painful and horrific manner, and more hypotheses and rumors start flying before another video is posted, this time by a former bartender who claims to have once heard screaming and gunshots coming from outside his bar, being too scared to inspect that night due to how nasty the neighborhood was. The following day, he and his boss would check the surveillance video, which he had uploaded for the narrator to see. The video, silent and very low-quality CCTV footage, depicts two men running through the street in panic in the dim glow of the bar's entrance lighting. One is quickly grabbed by a person whose face is obscured by a hoodie, causing him to twitch erratically before collapsing, with the killer immediately going after the man that escaped. The narrator mentions being concerned by the mention of gunshots from the bartender, as although the lack of audio recording from the CCTV prevents gunshots from being heard, the killer, who is quickly determined to be Rosie, is clearly unaffected by any such shots.
The subreddit would continue growing as months passed by, with many more videos and photographs of incidents and victims appearing online and multiple YouTube documentaries being made on Rosie which used all the compiled footage, as well as interviews with the narrator and first-hand witnesses to the events. Innumerous theories would be made concerning Rosie, and the narrator mentions being disturbed by all the fanart she attains, with people sympathizing with her and believing her to be misunderstood. What finally gets the narrator to snap, however, is a photo posted to the subreddit five months after its creation, which is simply titled "I didn't make it" and depicts Rosie from behind, her hood taken off, with a terrified young boy curled up into a ball at her feet, his eyes filled with unabashed terror and his face red from crying. Due to the lack of a background story, many people start accusing the person of having stopped to take photographs rather than to help the boy, and the narrator is left forever haunted by the photo's contents. It ultimately leads them to start a deep investigation into Rosie, attempting to dig up as much information about her as they can, though their search proves completely fruitless as no name, origins, or possible relatives can be linked to her due to how quickly she's able to disappear from a crime scene and how few traces she leaves behind aside from her victims and the many photos and videos taken of her.
The narrator continues their search indefinitely, ending the story by noting with severe worry how almost all of the locations Rosie was reported to have appeared in were incredibly remote or barely inhabited, with the 2017 incident being the first time she ever appeared in a heavily populated area.
Personality[]
Not much is known about Rosie's character due to her incredible elusiveness, with her backstory and abilities being left incredibly vague due to the lack of known information regarding her. From what is known of her, however, she seems to take very sadistic glee in each kill she performs, and she has no apparent motives for her cruelty aside from deriving twisted entertainment from it, being shown to have no qualms with killing animals or children. As her acts of murder are frequently recorded and documented, there's a possibility that she commits crimes for the infamy of it, ultimately upping her game by invading a large city and quickly reaching legendary status on the internet as a result. Despite this, she shows a clear desire to avoid facing any consequences for her crimes, as she's always quick to leave a scene before law enforcement arrives and will quickly flee to other countries to resume her killings. It is also left implied that she has supernatural powers due to how easily she evades the law and travels around the world, as well as her having the ability to kill living beings with a single touch.
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