Okay, hear me out.
A variation on the magnus archive’s idea of the Not-Them, moniker: the Cool-You. It’s still a Stranger, I Do Not Know You aligned creature, but instead of a predator, it’s a parasite.
It doesn’t kill you so it can take over your life and haunt kith and kin, instilling in them the creeping dread that you’ve been replaced and they couldn’t even notice.
It latches on to you, following you to every social interaction. When you go to a friends house, people greet the both of you: “Hi Alice, Hi Cool Alice,” failing to notice the strangeness of there being two Alices, nearly identical, in the same place. You standing beside your platonically ideal self, proof of maslovian theorys about self actualization.
The peak of Alicehood is standing beside you everywhere you go, and people notice her, how could they not: she’s you but perfect, but they don’t notice that she shouldn’t exist. They aren’t the prey.
You are.
At the onset, it’s not terrible. She just follows you around shares space with you. Is a little more well-spoken, outgoing, funny. If you tell a dud joke, she’ll riff on it to get laughs. The Cool-you makes things easier as it greases the wheels of social interaction, and you both get attention.
But, doubt sets in. And doubt grows into anxiety: Do people like me, or is it her, the Cool Alice that they like?
Sure people like our company, but do they like her company more than mine, and would they like her company more without me? Hell, do people like her so much more than me that they wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t here with her?
And this anxiety turns into social agoraphobia (which doesn’t affect cool Alice who is immune to anxiety), and an obsession with her, as you live vicariously through her because its easier to let her take over your life than to share space with her and fight a losing battle for attention as she vaccuums all the oxygen in the room away from you.
Eventually, you decide, holed up in the room you haven’t left in months while she’s been hanging out with your friends, posting to your social media feed, despite your having changed the password so many times, that If she wants your life so bad she can have it.
And you kill yourself in the throes of lonesome despair. But, of course, the Cool-You doesn’t want your life: it wants your misery. And as soon as your dead, you’re not miserable, and it moves on to the next victim.
But, your friend group doesn’t move on. They have to reckon, from their perspective through Stranger, I Do Not Know You’s addlehaze, with the idea that you killed yourself suddenly after months of having been the happiest, funniest, most joyous version of you they’ve ever known.
Theyr left to wonder: Why would Alice kill herself: She was always so happy around us?
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Anyway, I think Cool-Tim would be fun at parties.