Donna Bell wasn't the kind of girl who found herself becoming afraid in most situations. Growing up, the supernatural and occult had always been some of her favorite things to learn about. Even as a young child, she had been fascinated by it. There had always been strange occurrences that fell around her, and it only helped to push forwards her desire to learn more. 

After all, she'd grown up only a few doors down from a seemingly haunted lake. While the adults of Addleton didn't speak much about what had occurred in their town's lake, the younger citizens couldn't help but notice the stigma that surrounded it. The most popular rumor by far was that a boy had drowned and his body had never been recovered. 

Donna was so interested by this rumor that she tried to see if she could unearth anything about it herself, sometimes going to swim in the lake or trying to get on a boat to investigate. While she never found anything, she always kept her head up for any paranormal things that happened around the Addleton lake. 

But despite her lack of fear towards these things in general, there were always things that managed to slip through the cracks and get to her head. Mostly it was things in video games that ended up getting to her, as strange as that was. Perhaps it was just how staying up until dawn was about to break that made things seem strange within the television screen. 

One thing that had always bothered her was Deadhand from Ocarina of Time. Her friends had always laughed at her for that one, that was for sure. There were so many jokes to be made about that zombie-esque slug that slid around and tried to grab Link that for them it wasn't even scary anymore. 

But Donna found herself always disturbed by it and feeling desperate to run away. It wasn't something that ever really went away. But as she got older, she just had to make sure to stop showing her weaknesses to other people and just hide it with a smile. This had been her philosophy ever since she was a smile child - just hide it away. She wasn't always successful, but she always tried. 

This, of course, was a habit she'd inherited from her mother. She seemed to inherit everything from her mother, but that was mostly due to the fact that she never had a father to gain anything from. Donna couldn't remember ever having a father from the day she was born. As a child, she'd always wanted to find out exactly why this was the case.

Her mother would immediately clam up, place a smile upon her glossy lips, and offer her daughter some ice cream or some other trace in order to divert her daughter's attention. In her younger years, she always fell into this trap. But as she grew, she started to notice it and began to realize she wasn't going to get any answers.

Instead of pushing further into the situation, Donna just ended up picking up her own mother's behavior. Then she turned to her friends in order to make theories about what had really happened with her mother. This, of course, was something they never did at her house in fear that her mother might end up noticing. 

The main thing they'd come up with was that Donna was illegitimate (something her friends never failed to tease her on) and had been born while her mother was still in high school. As Allison Bell was by far the youngest mother of a teenager around, this certainly seemed to have some base.

On top of making theories, Donna's friends had always provided solace to her in one way or another, even if they weren't exactly the most comforting people. Their talents stayed more within the "making her laugh when she was down" zone, and she just got used to that. She'd gotten used to their crude ways of speaking and interacting, knowing that deep down they truly did care. 

She'd learned to love each of them in a strange sort of way - which they did in turn for her. The group remained rather solid for the many years they'd been together, even though they did have fights now and then. 

At the end of the day, she'd be able to laugh most of her problems away. Then they'd rush off on one of their consoles and have a major competition that involved a whole bunch of cussing and thrown controllers. To some, this would've seemed horrible, but for them it was the best fun they ever could have.

Reese and Tyler were her two best friends, but she only called the former by that name. Many liked to think that there was more than friendship going on between Donna and Tyler, but they constantly denied it. Only Reese seemed to let it go - and this was why Donna could easily call her a best friend. 

Despite being closest to those two particular people, she'd gotten an entire circle of friends all filled with dirty jokes and stupid puns along with a mutual love for video games. There was the passive-aggressive Josh, and then Emile with a near encyclopaedic memory of seemingly everything. 

Tyler's little brothers, Jon and Tim, ended up getting involved sometimes as well - but most of the time they were considered a bit too young for the conversations the group ended up drawing together. Nevertheless, they were always around if a Mario Kart tournament was launched out of nowhere and would be along with the rest of them. The main group just needed to make sure they put a filter on their conversations (although a few words slipped through when it came to red shells and banana peels). 

Donna grew accustomed to spending more time sitting in front of a TV screen, frantically pressing buttons and moving around joysticks, then doing anything else. She would easily stay locked up in her room for hours, avoiding her mother but always welcoming in her friends. To her, that was the most perfect life that could be imagined - then she walked through the door at groaned at reality.

For Donna's seventeenth birthday, her group of friends had come together in order to get her a special gift. Being a bunch of teenagers with bad habits instead of jobs, however, the money they came up with was barely enough to buy a secondhand Nintendo 64.

Nevertheless, Donna found herself absolutely delighted to find out she'd finally gotten that particular console. After spending so many hours of her life playing through Ocarina of Time at Tyler's house, she felt very happy to have it to herself. 

"We got you Super Smash Bros," Reese called out, leaning her elbows on her knees as she looked towards Donna's grinning face. 

"Of course you had to get something I couldn't play alone," Donna replied, rolling her eyes. "You finally get me a console so I can play on my own, and then you force me to play with you."

"No one's forcing you," Emile replied, lifting his hands up. 

"There's five of us here and only four controllers," Tyler noted. "So in other words...whoever gets the controller gets to play!"

Donna, already grasping a controller in her hands, raised it up into the air triumphantly. She then felt someone pluck it from between her fingers and looked to see Josh had taken it away from her. When she gave him a dirty look, he just shrugged it off. She watched with a slight pout as everyone else at the party grabbed a controller, leaving absolutely nothing for herself.

"You guys, I'm the birthday girl!" she cried out. "Doesn't the birthday girl get to play her own game, on her own Nintendo 64?"

"Not if she's too slow," Tyler teased. 

"You better be quicker next time," Reese warned. 

Donna, after rolling her eyes at her various party guests, then flipped all of them off with a smirk on her face. A few minutes of them playing on her new (new to her, anyways) N64 without her, she finally got her hands on a controller and started to beat up all of those who'd taken the controller away from her.

The rest of the birthday party went on in exactly that manner, causing lots of loud laughs and sharp outbursts of various obscenities whenever someone lost. In those moments, Donna felt confident that her seventeeth birthday had been the best she'd ever had. 

Despite the fun of the birthday party, Donna found herself feeling sort of empty just a few days later. She wanted more than Super Smash Bros to play on her brand new (brand new for her, that is) Nintendo 64. There were plenty more games out there that she wanted to play. A week of playing the same game over and over again only solidified this feeling.

The main issue with this was the fact the console was old, and so were all the games that one could play on it. That made it horribly difficult to find anything she could play, and if she did it usually ended up being far more expensive than she would've liked. For once, the internet was not being friendly to Donna, and she didn't appreciate it at all. She just wanted games that could fit in her limited budget.

She considered calling up Tyler and asking if she might be able to borrow his copy of Ocarina of Time, and then maybe buy it off of him. Then she thought better of it, realizing that her conversation would end up with him teasing her about how she always got uncomfortable around the Shadow Temple and her cussing him out goodnaturedly. 

Finally, the solution to her problems popped into her mind - what she really needed to do was find a place where everything was cheap and people might actually put out their old video games. What Donna needed was to find a whole bunch of garage sales and a handful of five dollar bills. 

Luckily enough, a nearby neighborhood had a major garage sale day coming up, and Donna was sure she'd be able to find something. She woke herself up early on the day of the sale, making sure to get everything she could as soon as possible.

She ventured through garage sale after garage sale, eventually collecting a decent amount of games she actually wanted to play. Not surprisingly, she wasn't able to find a single copy of Ocarina of Time. She'd been hopeful she could've found Majora's Mask in its place, but that wasn't the case either. Instead, she piled up her new games and hopped back in the car, ready to drive out of the neighborhood.

But right as she was about to leave, she turned her head to the left and noticed a house with a single table placed outside, a large pile of random junk attracting only a few people. Donna was drawn to this house, to this sale, thinking that just maybe there might be something for her. 

It was a strange sort of feeling - she seemed to be drawn towards the house. Even from a distance it seemed relatively clear there weren't going to be any video games buried within the mountain of junk, but she couldn't help but continue moving towards it.

The house sat right on the edge of the neighborhood, far from where the bright and cheery hoardes of garage sales filled with oblivious parents unaware of what they were giving away for a couple of bucks. The tables were more scattered, more of a mess - this would probably be Donna's last chance to snag a deal in the particular area.

As she moved closer to the house, her eyes scanned the tables. Donna didn't see anything that looked remotely video game-like in the enormous pile, but that didn't mean they weren't there. For all she knew, the owner of the house might just have them somewhere else. 

Sure enough, an old man came out through the garage and walked up to the table, right towards her. Donna found herself shaken - despite his grin, he didn't seem to be a welcoming man. His white hair stuck up in spikes, and one of his eyes was slightly glazed as if he suffered from a cataract. 

She didn't want to be impolite or anything, but if he hadn't already noticed her standing there she would've rushed away and pretended like she never came there to begin with. She tried to sift through the junk scattered across the table, but nothing she found even resembled a video game. 

Rather desperately, she continued looking through the pile, trying to find something that she could snag for a few dollars and then leave without any problem. Her searches became more and more frantic until she finally looked up.

Standing right in front of her was the old man she'd been trying to escape from the entire time. It took every bit of Donna's willpower to prevent a gasp from pushing out of her mouth, her heart beating wildly out of control for those first few moments. 

"What're you looking for?" he asked, giving a crooked smile. Donna inhaled a breath, trying to keep herself calm. She just felt so uneasy standing around this man, and only wanted to get through with the experience as quickly as possible. Now she wished she'd asked a friend to come along with her just for the sake of not being alone. 

Donna took several moments to figure out precisely what she wanted to say in order to get this situation through as quickly as possible. It was worth a try in order to see whether or not there might actually be something she was looking for, even though it didn't seem to be likely. 

"Um, do you have any video games?" she asked, forcing out a smile. She didn't expect him to know what she meant by "video game," but it was worth a try. Besides, when he said he didn't have a clue what she was talking about then she could just find a way to excuse herself and then drive back home without a care in the world. 

"Video game?" he said. "Yeah, I think I have one of those. Give me a moment - I'll be back in a jiffy!"

Donna felt like she could breathe better now that he'd walked away, but at the same time she knew he'd be coming back and there was always a chance he actually had something. She looked around her, and luckily enough there were still a few scattered people sorting through the junk.

The sound of a door opening made Donna jump, making her see that he indeed had a video game with him - and sure enough, it seemed to be a Nintendo 64 cartridge. She wouldn't call the experience lucky, but at the very least it hadn't gone to complete waste. 

"Here you are," he wheezed, handing the game over to her. She mumbled a quick thank you before starting to turn the grey cartridge around, trying to figure out precisely what she was looking at. 

The copy looked worn, the sticker usually used to identify the game completely missing. In its place were some letters beginning to fade, scrawled on in black sharpie. All it said was "Majora," 

Majora's Mask - exactly the game Donna had been looking for when she set out! It certainly didn't look like any N64 cartridge she'd ever seen before, but she might as well try to get a good deal for it in case it all ended up working out for her. 

"How much do you want for it?" 

"Nothing," he said, giving his toothy grin once again along with a hoarse sound Donna figured had to be a laugh. "You can have it for free."

"Really?" Donna asked. For a brief moment, a smile flashed upon her own face. But once she looked up to see the owner of the house, she couldn't help but lose it as it turned into a nervous frown. She probably shouldn't have to pay for the cartridge in such a condition to begin with. 

"Yes, really!" he said, attempting a laugh that ended up turning into a wheeze.

"Oh, well, thank you," Donna said hurriedly, quickly pocketing the cartridge and nodding several times. She raised up a hand in order to give a goodbye, rushing herself to get out of the area as quickly as possible.

"Goodbye then," he said, his voice too soft for Donna to hear him clearly. The tone of his voice immediately chilling her. She felt like, in an instant, she ended up becoming slower as every mov seemed to have a struggle attached to it. She immediately felt too awkward to do much of anything all over again.

Her mind started rushing - didn't she need to give him money? No, of course not, she was getting the game for free. Donna just couldn't think straight at this point in time no matter what she tried to do. She needed to get her mind back, and within a matter of seconds, before she couldn't escape from it all. 

"Thank you," she murmured, looking down to see a slight shake in her hands. He nodded several times in response, looking slightly sad at the fact she was taking the cartridge away from him. She turned around and walked away as quickly as possible without breaking out into a run. 

But when she got back to the car, she ended up thinking a bit deeper about what she'd just been through. The old man's behavior had been strange, to say the least, but maybe it went deeper than she naturally assumed. If he wanted to keep the cartridge, how come he'd just given it away for free? 

Now everything about the old man was really starting to bother Donna - his looks, his behavior, the general presence around him. She was counting her blessings that she no longer had to be near him and she'd walked off with the video game she'd been looking for...even if it wasn't the copy she would've chosen.

Donna started to think that the game might've belonged to someone the old man had been related to - he didn't seem to be someone who'd be into video games himself. Maybe the reason he'd given it up for free was because somehow Donna reminded him of whoever he'd lost. There might've been a child or a grandchild involved..and then, of course, that would explain his sadness later on.

At the end of the day, however, all Donna really wanted to do was play her copy of Majora's Mask and see how it worked. When she arrived home, she was very surprised to find out that the game functioned just about flawlessly. The only thing that she saw out of place to begin was that there was a save file already on the game, under the name of BEN.

"Ben," she said to herself, then paused for a moment. Maybe the old man hadn't been saying "goodbye, then." He'd been saying, "goodbye, Ben." Trying not to dwell on these thoughts too much, she started examining the save file. This Ben had nearly all the masks and was on the final temple of the game - it was a shame that he'd never gotten to complete it. 

Deciding to keep the file in his memory, Donna launched her own new game with the traditional name of Link for her character. She expected the worst case scenario when it came to playing through it, after seeing the way the cartridge looked. The game seemed to work pretty well so far, but she hadn't even gotten past the save file screen, of course.

Donna ended up being very pleasantly surprised about how the game ran for her, especially because she'd gotten for free. For the most part, there were only very minor glitches that appeared - a few NPCs spitting out the wrong line, Cuccos getting stuck in a fence, a bad camera angle during a cutscene. 

In Donna's mind, it was nothing to be worried about. She played through the beginning portions of the game, barely noticing anything that had gone wrong for more than a few seconds. She'd snagged quite a deal - a working copy of Majora's Mask for absolutely free. 

But there was one thing that started to make her fidget in her chair whenever it popped up. She felt a strange fear similar to that of when she'd had to deal with Deadhand back in Ocarina of Time. Every time it came up, she reminded herself she was just being stupid. There was absolutely nothing to be afraid of. 

What Donna didn't have control of was what she dreamed about, and this was precisely the sort of thing that would invade her mind, poisoning her dreams to become nightmares. Just like Deadhand, she couldn't help but be afraid of it, for whatever reason.

She'd put down Link for her save file name purely out of tradition. But sometimes the NPCs would use a different name - "BEN," just like in the save file that had been left behind. This couldn't be right, of course. She should be called Link and nothing else. 

Desperate to find out exactly what was going on, she tried to dig deeper into the situation. She started looking up mentions of BEN in connection with Majora's Mask. Nothing of use. Donna searched for how people could hack a game, or if there was some gag going on with the developers. Once again, she failed. She even asked Emile if he knew anything, and of course he did not. 

But despite the tense knot growing in her stomach, she still tried to figure out what was going on. When the name appeared in all capital letters, scattered throughout her dreams and darkening them, she tried to ignore it. The truth was more important than anything else, she decided, even if her search for it was going nowhere.

Donna dove back into the game, trying to see if she could find any further evidence of something that might explain what was going on. With all of the other random glitches, she needed to pay attention to anything that might be connected to names being switched around. It might have something to do with the text being swapped around, she realized.

Times like these made her feel like she would be better off if she knew how to hack into game files and find what was inside - but the idea of hacking made her stomach churn now that she knew of the potential cause of her problems being from a hacker. She played through the game, trying to avoid making any actual progress for the sake of being able to figure out more. 

Without a clear idea of what she was looking for, however, Donna ended up running around doing nothing within the game. She still jumped slightly when the characters called her "BEN," but otherwise she was bored. Her life was only getting worse because of the game, and she wasn't getting anything out of it. Despite her maddening curiosity, she couldn't go any farther at the moment.

Deciding there was nothing better to do, she deleted the BEN save file. All it took was a few button presses, and then it was over. She could just go about her life as if nothing were wrong. Really, all Donna needed to do was ignore the horrible sinking feeling that never seemed to leave her gut. 

Feeling that she'd spent too much of her life worrying about the game and its little glitches, she put the controller down and left it alone for several weeks. Gradually, it began to get out of her nightmares and she went back to feeling normal. But she wouldn't forget about the cartridge and the messed up game it contained - no, that was simply impossible.

A/N PREQUEL TO "TERRIBLE FATE," A JULY 2014 CAMP NANOWRIMO STORY. Just thought you should know that! This is sort of like a prologue, but it's also kind of a story of its own - you'll see why I thought this should be seperate soon. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed!

DISCLAIMER: I do not own Legend of Zelda or Majora's Mask or anything affiliated with it. The original BEN Drowned Creepypasta was produced by Jadusable and therefore belongs to them as well. Also, the use of references to various Let's Players such as by using their names is only for fun and is not intended to be offensive or demeaning in any way.