I started chatting with someone who behaved strangely. They'd abruptly leave mid-convo and sometimes come back with occasional typos as though their hands were a little shaky or something. I must've spoke to them for six months or so of the occasional red flags going off. Ultimately I got crazy emotionally invested since I'm a curious person by nature. Something about it was so tense we bonded quick to feel like family. A strong kinship. I also had terrible parents/siblings who were abusive growing up, so as a young teen I really needed some better support to help me grow. Perfect sucker for catfishing or finding a companion online. That was basically my new family for 14 years of my life. I started getting nosey, and the relationship was sort of played off as an abusive relationship, but I ended up meeting the "boyfriend" after a while. He was tied to a larger organization and it was more like... the original person was forced to live there kinda swaying between Stockholm Syndrome and a dozen other problems. Er, strangely enough I got along with the "boyfriend" better than you would expect. He found me amusing and had been reading most the convos when we first started talking. So him literally reading everything that was typed explained a lot of the limited screen time of the person I was talking to. He also knew a lot about me when I'd open up to my friend. So none of that was probably private. He added himself a group chat to monitor from there and would occasionally pop in at random to fuck about when he wasn't busy with other things. Way more blunt and cocky. He was fine just straight threatening about the extra freedom, but if anything happened he'd show up with a knife and livestream a murder to me. Over the years I guess he saw me like a mascot or something. He'd invite me to these temporary chats with dozens of people and for a while I thought one person was playing all of them and it was fake... But it was very elaborate. One person couldn't have pulled it off. For a bit I started to stop giving a fuck and actually said some pretty dumb shit. I threatened one guy who pissed me off when he said something out of line about my friend (first victim I spoke to often). The next week I was walking in town and some guy in a suit found me and struck up a conversation about my pet. He was talking about how he loved the breed and had always wanted one. Asked if I had ever considered giving her up for adoption and spoke about giving her a great home. He offered me a business card if I ever changed my mind and when he was walking away I noticed the first name was the same as the person I threatened. I started to take things way more serious and around then the guy became a bit more private and stopped dragging me around with him virtually when he did shit. I dunno if at that point maybe I was being used as blackmail against him or something? A few strange things happened like once a letter showed up addressed to me. Though the letter on the inside was for him, wishing him well. He always told me not to worry about it so it was never exactly explained. I'm still incredibly unclear what was real and what was fake. I'm really dumbfounded at how a lot of this one person would have pulled it off, so a part says it was real. Then another is like "The fuck are the chances though? This all sounds ridiculous." Instead I just never acknowledge it or bring it up to anyone. Not sure what else to do.