The rusty wrought-iron gates of the abandoned Sanitarium Graha Husada shrieked like a CFO whose bonus had just been clawed back by the board.
Tama adjusted his translucent blazer, tapping a frantic rhythm against the back of his holographic tablet while standing knee-deep in overgrown weeds that refused to rot properly.
"Check-in, people. I want location pings from everyone before the beta testers cross the threshold," Tama barked, his voice carrying the manic urgency of a man who had staked his entire post-mortem existence on a Series A pitch deck. "Big P, are you stationed at the east wing corridor? Kuni, is your ring-light casting the correct cinematic despair?"
"My ring-light is currently powered by pure spite and three stolen car batteries, Tama, so yes, the ambiance is immaculate," Kuntilanak’s melodic voice drifted down from the upper-story window, her emerald kebaya fluttering against the moldy stucco like a banned corporate memo. "If these Gen Z influencers don't scream within thirty seconds of stepping inside, I'm reviewing their Wi-Fi connection."
From the shadows of the collapsing portico, the Senior Pocong let out a low, bone-rattling sigh that sounded like a heavy filing cabinet sliding across a concrete floor. "I am stationed, Boss. My linen is tied to regulation specifications, and my back is throbbing with three centuries of accumulated sciatica. Can we start this nightmare already so I can go back to leaning against a damp wall?"
"Patience, Operations. Disruption doesn't happen in a vacuum," Tama snapped, swiping through a flurry of incoming alerts on his dashboard. "The beta testers are walking up the driveway right now. Remember the KPIs: minimum heart rate elevation of one hundred and twenty BPM, zero real-world police involvement, and absolutely no unsolicited hand-holding from Pak Joko."
"Hey! I resemble that remark!" Pak Joko’s ghostly civil servant form popped out of a nearby crumbling brick pillar, his bayonet-scarred chest glowing faintly under the moonlight. "Back in my day, we didn't need KPIs to terrify people. We just gave them malaria and bad memories!"
"That was pre-seed era, Pak Joko. We’re scaling now," Tama pointed at the front doors as they groaned open. "Places! Everyone look uncomfortably dead and highly marketable!"
Three mortals—clutching expensive vlogging cameras, oversized ring lights, and an embarrassing amount of branded energy drinks—stumbled into the pitch-black foyer of the asylum. Their laughter echoed off the peeling wallpaper, dripping with the hollow arrogance of youth and high follower counts.
"Dude, the lighting in here is so aesthetic for a night-walk stream," the lead vlogger, a bleach-blond kid wearing a distressed oversized hoodie named Rex, grinned into his camera lens. "Chat says if I stay in the isolation ward for ten minutes, they’ll fund my new gaming PC."
"Bro, look at the dust. My allergies are crying already," his female co-host, Chloe, muttered, coughing delicately into her sleeve while adjusting her autofocus. "If I don't get at least fifty thousand concurrent viewers from this, I'm quitting the channel."
"Don't worry, babes. We got you," Tama whispered from behind a half-rotten door frame, invisible to their mortal eyes but watching their engagement metrics spike instantly on his tablet. "Welcome to Gentayangan.co beta experience. Let's look at those conversion rates."
Suddenly, the temperature in the foyer dropped forty degrees. The ambient red glow of the vlogger's camera began to flicker, casting erratic, dancing shadows against the cracked mosaic floor.
"Whoa. Did the AC just kick on?" Rex stopped walking, his smug grin faltering as his phone battery dropped from eighty percent to absolute zero in a single second. "Wait, my stream is lagging. Is anyone else seeing this?"
From the ceiling beams above them, Kuntilanak dropped silently, her long jet-black hair swinging forward like a silken curtain. She didn't scream the classic, ear-splitting shriek of her ancestors; instead, she leaned down right beside Chloe’s ear, whispering in a tone so smooth and chilling it sounded like an ASMR trigger for existential dread.
"Your followers don't actually care about you... they’re just waiting for you to crash..."
Chloe gasped, dropping her ring light with a deafening crash that shattered the bulb into a thousand tiny glass shards. She stumbled backward, her chest heaving as pure, unadulterated adrenaline flooded her bloodstream.
"What the actual heck was that?!" Chloe screamed, grabbing Rex’s arm with trembling fingers. "Did you hear that? Someone just whispered right into my brain!"
"Run! Run!" Rex yelled, turning toward the heavy oak doors, only to find them slam shut with a violent, supernatural bang.
Before the panic could fully settle into despair, the hallway ahead of them plunged into absolute darkness. A low, rhythmic thud... thud... thud... began to echo against the floorboards, slow and methodical, like a grandfather clock ticking down the final seconds of a doomed quarter.
Out from the shadows of the east wing crawled the Senior Pocong. Bound tightly in his rotting white shroud, he didn't hop clumsily; thanks to Tama’s new High-Efficiency Mobility Initiative, he slid across the polished floor with terrifying, serpentine grace, blocking their only exit.
"Oh god! What is that thing? Is that a giant cotton burrito?!" Rex shrieked, backing away against the peeling wall while his camera frantically tried—and failed—to capture the entity's distorted face.
The Senior Pocong tilted his head at an unnatural ninety-degree angle, his necrotic indigo eyes locking onto the mortal lens with the exhausted, deadpan stare of a retail manager dealing with a Black Friday return.
"Please remember to like, subscribe, and rate our haunting service five stars," the Pocong droned in a voice that sounded like grinding tombstone gravel. "Failure to do so will result in eternal administrative purgatory."
Chloe let out a sound that was half-scream, half-sob, collapsing onto the dusty floor while clutching her chest. "I’m quitting vlogging! I’m moving to the woods! Just don't let the cotton burrito eat me!"
Behind a cracked window on the second floor, Tama watched the biometric panic graphs light up his tablet in brilliant, pulsating strokes of emerald green.
“BPM spike at one hundred and forty-five. Fear retention rate at ninety-eight percent. Viral share probability: maximum,” Tama muttered to himself, a wide, razor-sharp grin splitting his translucent face. “Oh, the King of Tuyul is going to love these numbers.”
Down in the foyer, Rex threw his hands up in total surrender, screaming directly into his dead camera while the Senior Pocong casually hovered an inch off the ground to save his aging spine.
"We give up! Take our channels! Take our brand deals! Just let us leave!" Rex wailed, dragging Chloe toward a shattered side window as they scrambled blindly out into the night.
The heavy oak doors creaked open slightly, letting in a cool breeze of night air as the sound of the vloggers' terrified footsteps faded rapidly down the driveway.
Silence descended upon the abandoned asylum once more, broken only by the soft, satisfied hum of Kuntilanak reapplying her lipstick in a broken vanity mirror.
The Senior Pocong floated backward, letting his bound linen frame slump heavily against a pillar with a deep, shuddering groan. "My lumbar region is destroyed, Tama. If that's what customer acquisition looks like, I want a severance package and an eternity of uninterrupted sleep."
Tama marched down the grand staircase, his translucent loafers clicking sharply against the tile, his eyes glued to the glowing metrics on his screen.
"Severance? Big P, look at the cloud data!" Tama shouted, holding the tablet up like a holy relic. "We just trended number one on the astral network! Our retention rate is through the roof, our engagement is viral, and our seed-round valuation just doubled!"
Kuntilanak snapped her compact mirror shut with a satisfying click, drifting over with a smug, victorious smile. "Did I look good on their camera stream, CEO darling? Be honest. Was my tragic aesthetic giving main character energy?"
"You were an absolute unicorn, Kuni," Tama beamed, adjusting his invisible tie as he looked out across the ruined foyer, seeing not an abandoned, rotting asylum, but a sprawling, highly profitable corporate empire. "Pack your spectral bags, team. Tomorrow, we take Sector Four global."