The tape clicked inside the VCR. "I want to play a game. Fred, for years you've put your friends lives on the line because you wanted to be a hero solving mysteries. Tonight, the danger is very real. There are no men in rubber masks. Your gang has been split up. Each one is playing their own game and the stakes are live or die. You have the opportunity to help your friends, if you can make the difficult decisions and sacrifices that real leadership requires. The lives of Mystery Incorporated are in your hands."

Fred was groggy, sitting in a worn chair in front of a bank of flickering old televisions and a series of levers that looked like they were made from rusted steel stock. Through the grainy static snow on the screens, he saw Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and Scooby-Doo waking up in dingy rooms in the same kind of industrial warehouse as he was. "Gee," he said to himself. "We're really in a pickle this time."

***

"Velma. I want to play a game. You like to challenge your intellect against the things that go bump in the night. Tonight will not be academic. There's a perfectly logical explanation for how you can keep yourself alive, if you can just see the way out."

Velma Dinkley woke up in a small room lit by a bare bulb. The room was filled with a rats nest of wiring snaking through the room, tangled and snarled up on itself. It was hard for her to fully appreciate her situation because everything was a blur without her glasses. Groping blindly in hopes of finding them, she was yanked back by the handcuffs holding her to a post. Tracing the wires as best she was able, she spotted a series of car batteries connected together with arcs jumping from the terminals every so often, sending a shower of sparks raining down. Projected onto the wall, red digits large enough even for Velma to read them were counting down. Velma thought she had an idea of what would happen when that hit zero and it wasn't good. She swallowed. "Jinkies."

***

"… You've always been the damsel in distress, Daphne. Tonight, you'll have to outrun your reputation and choose to save yourself."

Daphne was suspended at the wrists by duct tape from a chain. After finding out how useless it was to try to holler for help, she began to struggle against the bind, swinging her body the way she'd been taught in gymnastics lessons until the tape snapped. Scraped from the hard fall onto a rough surface, as she picked herself up floodlights turned on revealing she was inside a narrow corridor that looked like the chute of a garbage compactor with steel slab walls close on both sides. "Jeepers," she said before the rubber strip she was standing on lurched into motion. She screamed as machinery came online, the giant conveyor belt carrying her towards a crusher. She scrambled to her feet, running to keep up with the belt.

***

Shaggy turned the rusted hacksaw over in his hand. This was, like, way beyond the usual sort of mess Fred would get them into, man. Whoever this guy was behind all this, Shaggy thought, he didn't seem like he was just interested in scaring people off land to claim insurance money or whatever. Scooby and Shaggy were chained to the walls on opposite sides of a filthy white-tiled bathroom. Shaggy's teeth chattered whenever he looked at the center of the room where what looked like a real, no faking, dead body of some old guy was laying face down in a pool of his own blood. There was a box of Scooby Snacks standing right next to the poor fellow, tantalizingly out of reach for either of them. Shaggy shrugged at the camera on the wall, staring into its lens and seeing the blinking red activity light. "Like, what'd Scoob ever do to you? He's just a dog, for Pete's sake!"

"Reah, rog! Ret re go."

Shaggy tugged uselessly at the manacle again as a really messed up thought came to him. "Zoinks, old buddy ol' pal. I don't think he wants us to cut through our chains. I think, like, we're supposed to saw through our legs!"