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The man trudged through the murky swamp, his black cloak wavering in the wind. He looked up, spotting a moss-covered boulder just in time to see it shake, rumbling in the earth. All the other surrounding rocks were suddenly magnetized to the boulder as it shifted and turned, forming a towering golem-like creature, which stared down at him with a cold, stony glare from its sparkling diamond eyes.
The man grinned, throwing off his cloak to reveal the slick, red stereotypical 'superhero' bodysuit beneath, a white 'S' plastered across the chest. "I am Captain Seismic, and I've come to hunt you down, beast!"
The Golem's rocky arm rose up to the sky, then it was bought down in a flash. The strike was narrowly dodged by Captain Seismic, leaving it to crash into the ground, embedding the beast's arm in a small crater. The hero skated across the shattered earth as if it were ice, sliding up the beast's arm as it attempted to pull it out of the crater.
"You were an easy one," Captain Seismic chuckled as he hopped from the beast's shoulder, landing on its head. "Hopefully the next will be more entertaining to fight!"
The hero's hand began to glow with hot, red energy, and he plunged it into the beast's head, tearing out the core, a glistening opal gemstone. Letting out a deafening shriek, the Golem creaked and wailed, eventually collapsing into a pile of pebbles.
Captain Seismic stood over the body of his enemy with a smug grin on his face as he made his declaration, tucking the opal into his pocket. "That's why you don't try to fight me, Captain—"
Reality shattered and Lucas was ripped out of his imagination as Jennifer, his mom, shouted from their house, "Come back inside, dinner's ready! And stop playing in the mud, you're gonna get dirty!"
"Okay, Mom!" He shouted. "Just lemme' finish my speech!"
His mom simply chuckled and slid the glass door closed, leaving Lucas alone with his pile of rocks. He straightened his posture, looking down at the pile. "That's why you don't try to fight me, Captain Seismic!"
He kicked at the heap of rocks and ran inside, taking his seat at the dinner table. "Breakfast for dinner tonight! So, what fun adventures did you have today?" Jennifier said, setting a plate of syrup-covered pancakes in front of him.
"I went through the swamps and defeated a Golem! It was crazy, you should've seen it!" Lucas picked up his fork, digging into his supper like a dog.
"I'm sure it was very nice. What's the name of your little hero again? Earthquake Man?"
He dramatically dropped his fork, gasping with his pancake filled mouth. "Whhm Mmn Sei—"
"Swallow your food, honey."
Lucas chewed for a few seconds before gulping everything down, returning back to his over overdramatic exclamation. "I'm Captain Seismic!"
"Alright, well I hope you have fun on your next adventure." His mom played along, reminiscing on her old childlike innocence for a moment. "But I think it's Captain Seismic's bedtime."
"Yeah! I've got to be super strong and energized if I wanna fight! Oh, I almost forgot, look what I got!" Lucas reached into his pocket, pulling out the radiant opal Captain Seismic had retrieved from the beast. He held it up, showing Jennifer. "Look! Isn't it cool!"
"Lucas I…" She plucked the gemstone from his hands, studying it for a moment before looking back to him. "Where did you find this?"
"I got it from the Golem!" He beamed.
"I…" His mom paused. "Get to sleep, darling."

"Let's skip the introductions, eh?" Captain Seismic punched his fist forward, sending a shockwave of energy into the towering Golem, which stumbled back but held its ground. "You seem like a stronger one."
The Golem dashed forward in a blur, stopping where Captain Seismic had stood. It slowly turned to see him scoff, a cocky smile on his face. "I think you're forgetting one thing, beast."
"That I!" He rose his hand into the sky.
"Am!" His hand began to glow with red-hot energy once more.
"A hero!" Lucas exclaimed, slashing his hand down as he clenched his eyes closed. A red pillar of force burst forth from his hand, slicing through the pile of rocks in front of him as if they were butter.
Lucas opened his eyes to see the earth in front of him cracked in half, a trail of destruction leading to their old oak tree, which looked as if it had been ripped in half.
He glimpsed down at his right hand, which was still a bright shade of red, and whispered under his breath.
"I am Captain Seismic."

When will you ever grow up? You aren't a fucking kid anymore.
…
Are you kidding me!? You're crying? Just be a—
A few blocks away in Site-87, Agent Cherry shot up in a cold sweat, awaken by a short boom that quaked through the earth. He hopped onto his computer, bringing up a digitized map of Sloth's Pit. In the south of town, right off King Circle, a green circle flashed. He clicked on it, pulling up the camera feed of the area.
Oh my…
In the midst of the destruction-stricken land sat a small child— he couldn't have been more than eight years old— digging through a pile of pebbles with a glowing hand. What could've— No.
But… Cherry stopped. I should check…
Pushing his chair away from his desk, he pulled open the drawer behind him. He dug through it, past the random piles of notecards, pencils, and other supplies to find a small rectangular device with a "Property of S&C Plastics" sticker on one side, a set of knobs on the other, and dials on the top, connected to a metallic rod. The Pickman-Sinclair Narrative Fluctuation Detector.
He grabbed it and turned back to his desk, holding it's rod up the camera feed. It flickered for a moment before turning bright green, prompting a loud sigh from Cherry.
Do we even have protocols for this?

There was a rhythmic knocking on the door of Lucas' house.
"Coming!" Lucas's mom said, running to the door and opening it. "Hello, Mr…"
"Cherry." The man fidgeted, straightening his tie.
"Well, nice to meet you, I'm Jennifer." With a wave of her hand, she invited him into the house, studying his appearance. "Wait, it feels like I've… Oh! You're one of those plastics people, right? What, did Mr. Albany's lycanthropy act up again?"
"No, no. This is about your son."
Jennifer's face immediately darkened as she turned her face away from the anxious agent.
"I need to talk with him, if that's okay with you."
She opened her mouth as if she were about to say something, but held herself back, instead pointing at a nearby stairwell. "Lucas' room is the first door on the right. He's probably playing in his little fort."
"Thank you."
Cherry slowly walked through the house, the sound of his shoes on the hardwood floor breaking the tense silence as he made his way to a door, which he summarily knocked on. "Lucas? I'm Agent Cherry, may I please come in?"
There was a small rustle of papers, then the boy replied through the door. "Shoes."
"Hmm?"
"Take your shoes off. Mom doesn't like it when people wear shoes on the carpet."
Feeling a subtle, warm nostalgia bubble up in his heart, a smile trickled onto Cherry's face as he was suddenly reminded of his own mother— how she had endlessly scolded him about tracking mud through the house when he came home from his little adventures to the nearby creek.
He slipped his black loafers off and quietly opened the door, shutting it as he stepped through. Blankets stretched from the child's desk to his bed, draping down to create a small fort. Lucas' face peeked through the flappy 'door' of the fort, before retreating back inside. "Come in," he whispered.
Cherry stifled a small laugh, then crawled inside. The inside of the fort was very cozy, with blankets padding the floor, a small, dim candle sitting in the middle of it all, surrounding by childlike, crayon drawings depicting a red-suited hero. Lucas sat inside, a plate of cookies beside him, and— despite being covered with a quilt, Cherry could see the faint red glow of his hand.
He took a moment to absorb the calm atmosphere of the fort before speaking. "So, Lucas, I noticed your hand is a bit… bright? Do you know how that happened?"
"I'm Captain Seismic." Lucas took the quilt off of himself, pointing towards one of the drawings on the floor, which depicted the red superhero fighting off a gigantic, rocky humanoid.
The agent studied the drawing, sighing. "Well, you see… I don't know how to put this lightly. You know Sloth's Pit isn't a normal town, correct?"
"Yeah. There's tons of cool stuff here…"
"Yes, some of it is cool, but… sometimes it can be a bit dangerous. There's this thing called The Narrative. I'm sure your mom has told you about The Hook-Handed Man. Well, he only exists because many of us believe in him. We think he's real, therefore he is."
"Well, good for him. Existing is fun."
"It sure is." Cherry let himself laugh before clearing his throat. "Anyways, I believe your hand is red because you think you're this… Captain Seismic?"
Lucas' brow furrowed. "I'm Captain Seismic, and I defend the world from monsters. Nobody's as strong as me!"
"I'm sorry, but—"
A sudden thunder shook the house, almost knocking the candle onto the blanketed floor. While Cherry errantly grabbed it, put it out, and made sure it would not tip over again, Lucas perked up, running out of the fort.
"W- Wait!" The agent stuttered, running after him.

Cherry sprinted out of the opened sliding glass door, his socked feet soaked in a puddle as he looked up into the clouded, rainy sky.
Floating in the air high above him was Lucas, whose hands were growing increasingly brighter as he charged up a burst of power, which he shot forward, dispersing the fog around him. Squinting, Cherry could just make out a silhouette of—
The behemoth dashed forwards, rumbling the ground with every step. Lucas simply held his hand forward, forming a transparent scarlet shield in front of the Golem, which it crashed into.
"So you're the strongest?" His voice boomed.
The Golem answered by raising one of its rocky hands and striking the shield, shattering it instantly.
"I guess you are, then. Well…" Lucas closed his hand into a fist as a violent beam of energy blasted towards the behemoth, which raised its rocky hands to form a blue beam of its own. As the rays met, Lucas felt himself suddenly pushed back, yet he held his ground, pushing forward with a grimace.
As the child and the monster found themselves in a standoff, Cherry watched speechlessly. How the hell is he so strong? Is—
"Come on, Lucas!" The agent's head jerked back to see Jennifer shout towards the battle. "You can do it! You're a hero!"
Up in the sky, Lucas felt a sudden surge of power as he pushed himself forward.
Ah.
Cherry tried to blink it away, yet a single tear still ran down his cheek.
Of course.
Wiping his eyes with his sleeve, he cried into the sky: "Go Captain Seismic!"
And Lucas exploded with power, vaporizing the Golem once and for all. As his vision faded to black, he began to descend from the sky, right into the arms of his awaiting mother. She hugged him for a moment before looking up to Cherry.
"So, are—"
The agent interrupted her, mustering up a weak smile. "I think the issue has been dealt with. I… I'll take my leave." Turning, he paused for a moment before looking back. "Oh, and Jennifer?"
"Yes?"
"Keep being a good parent."

A few days later, Cherry yawned as they collapsed into their desk chair, pulling up the video feed behind Lucas' house.
There, the child stood, swinging his arms in the air as if he was striking an invisible target. Suddenly, a red blast came bursting from his fist, flying off-camera, at which he celebrated.
The agent giggled, closing the feed before relaxing back in the chair, letting his sleepy brain wander to the whimsical corners of his imagination.

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ideological-imbroglio 04/12/12 (Thu) 12:06:22 #12766349

Tower-B.

Deep-sea sat-divers are kind of like celebrities. There aren't a lot of them — just a couple hundred in the whole wide world.
Here's why: You know that steel pressurized tube under the belly of the ship? The one with about as much room as a walk-in closet? That's where you'll spend the next two weeks eating, sleeping, and shitting while your body acclimates to a high-pressure environment. The guys above pump in a gas mix that makes you sound like Donald Duck, and all your meals get squeezed down a hose tighter than the sphincter on a chaplain's daughter.
My point is this — it's dangerous, crazy work. But it's also a lot of fun. You meet amazing people and get some amazing stories. You see things with your own two eyes that no other human being gets to. Back then, there's absolutely nothing else I'd rather do.
I made my final dive in 1981 under Tower-B — an offshore oil rig in the Norwegian North Sea. Two months after I left, Daniel Balestri (my partner and co-diver) was found dead after something that the technicians called an "explosive decompression event". A friend of mine filled me in on the details.
He and his partner were coming up from a dive. The diving bell (a little pressurized cabin that divers sit in while going down or coming up) was getting connected back to the hyperbaric chamber, so they could start the (very slow) process of decompression. But while one handler worked on the mating flange, the other punctured the seal and exposed the divers to the atmosphere.

Daniel Balestri's remains.

The coroner's report says that Balestri was "partially forced through a steel orifice 45 centimeters in diameter, resulting in the bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity and the violent expulsion of nearly all internal organs". In other words, 8 atmospheres of pressure squeezed a six foot man through a foot and a half wide hole. A chunk of his large intestines ended up strung up on steel rafters 15 feet up and over 30 feet away. Everyone else died near-instantly.
This and the Byford Dolphin incident in 1985 led to compression systems being refitted with safety devices to prevent disasters like this. But there's a crucial difference between this and the Byford Dolphin incident: the handler who breached the seal was a veteran diver. There was no miscommunication, no confusion — no reason to do what he did.
And so this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night: What made him decide to force open that door?

ideological-imbroglio 04/12/12 (Thu) 12:31:09 #28993436

A neotenous axolotl.

You got a lot of time to yourself when you're sat-diving. I spent mine reading.
One of my favorite books describes an unusual breed of Mexican salamander called the axolotl. What makes axolotl peculiar is how they differ from other species: most salamanders begin life as aquatic creatures, breathing through their gills. Eventually, they mature into adults — losing the gills and developing lungs.
Axolotl never develop lungs. Instead, they spend their entire lives underwater.
In 1863, a French zoologist received a shipment of axolotls from Mexico. When he opened the box, he discovered that it contained an entirely different species of salamander — darker in coloration and capable of surviving on land.
What he learned was that this was actually the same species: at some point in their evolution, axolotl discarded their matured form, retaining their juvenile characteristics. But when placed in a new environment — in this case, an enclosed, tightly sealed box — they were able to achieve this forgotten "adult" state.
The ability for an organism to retain useful juvenile characteristics well into adulthood is called neoteny. It's something you commonly see among domesticated animals (dogs and cats), and even — to a certain degree — in humans.
It is, in essence, the ability for an organism to exist in a larval state when doing so serves its interest. But put that organism in the right environment? It undergoes a metamorphosis. It remembers a developmental path forgotten by evolution millions of years ago. It matures. It hatches.
What emerges can be unrecognizable.

ideological-imbroglio 04/12/12 (Thu) 12:42:11 #12968544

An oil platform is its own self-contained ecosystem. You have to produce your own power, potable water, even handle your own sewage. The only connection to the rest of the world is by air and sea, and a storm can take both away in a heart-beat.
Point is that the work can be isolating and tedious. People do strange things to stay sane. Sometimes it's maschismo, sometimes it's boredom, and sometimes it's just pure cabin fever. Throw in that whole "living in an isolated pressurized room with just one other person" gig that saturation divers have, and you got yourself a recipe for nuclear-grade bone-headedness.
I don't know when Balestri and I started competing to see who could dive deeper or ascend faster. I just know it was dumb as hell — and I knew it back then, too.
Decompression sickness is no joke. The human body's adaptability to high and low pressure environments is contingent upon slow, incremental exposure. Drastic changes produce pockets of expanding gas inside of you: in your veins, your organs, even inside your brain. Your eyes will bleed, your heart will stop, and your lungs will (quite literally) explode.
But when there's shit to do and only one person to do it with, you'll find anything to delay the boredom. The joint pain and headaches were just part of the entry-fee.
Balestri's back kept acting up; kept complaining about it feeling "crooked". I asked him a few times if he wanted to stop. He'd just swallow some aspirin and laugh it off.
I kept thinking about those axolotl, trapped in that sealed box. I kept thinking about how, in the darkness of that enclosed space, they started to change. I kept thinking about how my back was starting to hurt, too.

ideological-imbroglio 04/12/12 (Thu) 12:49:19 #38389309

When you spend your days nearly a thousand feet below in a place so deep that the only thing keeping the pressure from crumpling your skull is the fluid already inside it, you see some shit. Lovecraft's got nothing on good ol' mother-nature. You want to know the wildest thing I've ever seen? The absolute wildest?
Sea centipede.
Now, if you know a little bit about marine biology, you already know that there is no such thing. You're probably already compiling a mental list of all the possible things I could have seen that look like a sea centipede (bristle worms, clam worms, some sort of isopod, maybe even a weird sea cucumber).
But I know what I saw, and it wasn't a sea cucumber. I was down installing clamps on the riser lines. Usually worked with Balestri, but his back was bothering him — and the supervisor told me we needed these clamps yesterday. So, down I went — alone.
I was at the bottom of the ocean floor in a pressurized suit, working in a place where the only sound was the slosh of fluids around and inside my own head. And that's when I caught it out of the corner of my eye — something emerging from the ocean fog.
Segmented body. Bone-white. Nearly three feet long. It crawled along the ocean floor, picking its way over rocks and sand on over thirty pairs of legs — barreling straight for me. And by the look of it, it meant business.
I hauled ass faster than I've ever hauled before. When I got back into the decompression chamber, Balestri was laying on his back, trying to ignore the pain. I told him what I saw.
He just laughed — but something about that laughter was off. It was harder and fiercer. Like he was desperate to laugh it all away.
That was the day I realized something wasn't right. It was my last day as a saturation diver. The instant I finished decompression, I got off that rig and never looked back.

ideological-imbroglio 04/12/12 (Thu) 12:55:21 #61192724

After the accident, authorities seized all on-site records and reduced Tower-B's operational staff to a skeleton crew of twenty. The ensuing investigation found "a culture among management antagonistic toward safety" — which is just a fancy way of saying the people running the place didn't give a fuck if any of us died so long as they got paid. Tower-B was shut down and decommissioned in 1989.
I've had a lot of time since then to think about the incident with Balestri in 1981. A lot of details keep nagging at me.
The spot where the handler breached the seal? The diving bell's got a steel-reinforced porthole right above it. Which means when he was cracking open the pressurized chamber that would kill him and everyone around him, he was looking inside of it. He was looking at Daniel Balestri.
There's one more thing. It's the strangest part, and what keeps me up at night. It's why I haven't seen a doctor in over a decade — despite the fact that I've been experiencing excruciating back-pain since 1981.
Daniel Balestri didn't die in the accident. Neither did the other diver. The coroner determined that both were killed prior to the breach, via an unspecified 'severe back trauma'. The worst part?
Neither of their spines were found.


ideological-imbroglio 10/31/18 (Wed) 03:15:47 #21676943

Still from Nichts (1951).

The recent disappearance of Basil Ottinger (and the subsequent discovery of several "lost films" in his private collection) has re-ignited cinema's fascination with the revolutionary work of an underground independent film-maker known as "Josef Hellmuth".
The reclusive director's fame in cinema circles is ironic: Hellmuth is best known for not wishing to be known. Only one of his films (Schweigen, 1953) contains an end-credit sequence, wherein he thanks meine lieben Wohltäter ("my dear benefactors"). His work was distributed privately through Panopticon Pictures until the company declared bankruptcy in 1962; nearly all extant prints were destroyed in a warehouse fire.

Hellmuth's work is characterized by sparse structure, emotional isolation, fascination with negative space, no dialogue, and single extraordinarily long takes. His first film (Nichts, 1951) is a two-hour exploration of a dilapidated, abandoned munitions factory. What makes the film remarkable is how it is shot: one single, smooth tracking shot that begins at the entrance, descends several flights of stairs, and ends in a basement. Given the lack of identifiable cuts, tracks, or rails (even along the stairs), the movie's release produced endless speculation among cinematographers regarding how this was done.
Although Nichts is the most "conventional" film Hellmuth produced, it still contains surrealist elements that would become hallmarks of his style. The factory's basement is improbably vast, containing far more levels than it should (and includes strange, unidentified machinery). At several points, the camera focuses on objects that are out of place (a pink ribbon, false teeth, a wooden dreidel). Near the seventy-minute mark, a silhouette is briefly visible passing by a doorway. The final shot (where the camera explores a pitch black room) lasts for fifteen minutes — during which only heavy breathing can be heard.
Themes of isolation and emptiness are further elaborated on in Hellmuth's fifth film, Doppelgänger (1953). Comprised of a ninety-minute long tracking shot, the viewer navigates a carnival's 'hall of mirrors' while pursued by a hazy, indistinct figure (visible only in each mirror's reflection). The film ends abruptly when the figure appears in front of the camera, obstructing its view.
Numerous die-hard Hellmuth fans have mapped out the interior of the hall based on the camera's movements, only to discover that the camera often moves through what ought to be a solid mirror. To this day, vigorous debate continues over how Hellmuth achieved this and other effects (such as the absence of the camera's reflection in any one of the hall's hundreds of mirrors).

Still from Schuld (1954).

Schuld (1954) is perhaps the film for which Hellmuth is most infamous. It is three hours long, and consists of a single fixed shot: four figures burning atop a pyre as a crowd watches from below. Details regarding its screening at a 1965 Oldenburg film festival are murky. Viewers expressed distress, anxiety, and physical illness; this allegedly escalated with the audience storming the projection booth and destroying all prints of the film.
Hellmuth is notorious for being tight-lipped about his work, having never publicly commented on it. However, in 1961, a student attending Merz Akademie uncovered a letter authored by him in the college's archives. The following excerpt (translated from its original German) elaborates on his views regarding the role of the author:

"Death of the Author" presumes too much. It presumes the author may exist. But this cannot be permitted. The author must be obliterated down to their elemental structure, down to their essence, their very core. No trace of their presence can remain on this earth. The author must cease to be.
Art can only be understood as an excretion of natural, indeterminable events — a thing that is shaped via a rudderless process devoid of intent, purpose, or reason. Rain-drops falling through a canopy of leaves. Apples withering on the branch of a decaying tree. Maggots bursting from a dead pigeon's breast.
The author is more than 'irrelevant'. Their irrelevance is such that to merely mention this irrelevance is to grant them more relevance than they deserve. To say the author is dead, you must first presume the author was once alive. But the author was never alive. The author was never even there.

Photo taken from viewing of Abwesenheit (1962).

Immediately after the publication of this letter in several film periodicals, Josef Hellmuth ceased to respond to all correspondence and phone-calls; no one has heard from him since. In 1962, he produced and published his final film: Abwesenheit.
All six copies of Abwesenheit were believed to be lost in the 1962 fire. However, in 1987, a recording of a private viewing was recovered from the home of Basil Ottinger (a prominent art collector obsessed with the study of Hellmuth). Although incomplete, it indirectly captures a small portion of the filmmaker's final masterpiece.
The footage is several minutes in length, and focuses on a television screen on which Abwesenheit is playing. The television's footage is heavily distorted. The audience (out of frame) produces muffled sobs; Ottinger repeatedly apologizes. As the film draws to its conclusion, the audience becomes increasingly distressed. One member starts to pray. Ottinger begs for it to stop.
A hand descends in front of the camera, obstructing its view of the television. The recording abruptly ends.
Investigations into Basil Ottinger's disappearance (and the location of the fabled surviving print of Abwesenheit) have turned up no results. However, it is notable that the footage of Ottinger's viewing was recorded with Kodak 5247 (Josef Hellmuth's preferred film stock).


Global Occult Coalition. Serpent's Hand. Chaos Insurgency. I know everything there is to know about all of the Groups of Interest on record. I have placed agents into every single one of them; they relay everything they discover straight back to me. I have lifted the veils of several mysterious GoIs: we can now shut down almost every single Are We Cool Yet? installation before it even begins. But there was one I didn't know until recently. One I needed to know about. And that one was Nobody.
My experiences with Nobody began when I was appointed as head of the Foundation's Group of Interest monitoring agency. Each entry had vast databases of people believed to be members of the organisations and comprehensive descriptions of the motivations behind each group. Then, while I sat at my new computer, I discovered a somewhat atypical entry; one for an individual referred to as Nobody. The log claimed their identity or identities, motives and everything else about them was unknown, cloaked in mystery. They have worked with and against essentially all GoIs and have kept all information about themselves entirely hidden from view.
At first, I was convinced that a more revealing description existed. I liased with other, more experienced members of Foundation staff and even went so far to communicate with the Global Occult Coalition. Every time, I was told the same thing: nobody knows, but Nobody knows. This did not satisfy me. I continued my search, leafing through archaic documents until the sun rose the next morning. The case was a dead end. Nothing that I could find got me any closer to discovering the true identity of Nobody. Eventually, I realised I was getting nowhere and I gave up hope. ‘Some mysteries never get solved', I told myself.

The next part of my life relating to this enigma of a man came years later. Now a veteran by Foundation standards, I controlled almost all aspects of inter-GoI communication from the Foundation's side. One uneventful Saturday, I reentered my office after lunch. While I unlocked and opened the door, I was aware of a chilling draught. At the time, I had subconsciously blamed it on an open window, but my office was below the ground. Entering the office, I discovered a folded piece of lined paper which had been deposited on my desk. My child-like curiosity outweighed the logical side of the brain at this moment, and as a result I quickly opened the document. The text was handwritten in perfect cursive and was extremely brief, however I have never been so pleased by any other correspondence. Below, I have attached a scanned copy of the letter I received:

Greetings, Arthur Barnes.

You will be meeting with me soon.

Nobody

One of the few things I had discovered about Nobody is that they were known for extremely vague, cryptic communication. For this reason, I elected not to attempt to seek out Nobody; Nobody would come to me. But I was ready. This time the mystery would be gone, the facade would be broken. Nobody would be Somebody now.

Days became weeks and weeks became months. The thought of Nobody was in the back of my mind, but it still lingered. One night, I found myself leaving the Site by foot, having left my car at a mechanic to fix its squeaking brake pedal. A thick covering of cinereal clouds blanketed the dull streets, darkening alleys and dispersing crowds. I shivered slightly as a cold breeze penetrated my thin white shirt. I entered one of the darker alleyways. In hindsight, this was probably a bad idea, but I still had ‘Nobody' plastered all over the inside of my overworked mind.
As I strolled down the narrow street, I heard a purposeful cough erupting from a figure behind me. I span around to view the figure, heart in my throat. “Who are you?” I asked them.
“I am Nobody,” the figure replied. It was wearing a charcoal trench coat and a jet black fedora, obscuring its body and face from view. The voice was high-pitched, although it was distinctly masculine.
Fearing that I was going to ruin my opportunity to solve this mystery, I neglected to ask any questions relating to his identity. Instead, I asked about the reasoning behind his presence: “Why are you here?”
“You see, Mr. Barnes, I know a lot about you. I know about your obsession with my identity and my motives. I have even more insider knowledge about your Foundation than you have about anything on your extensive list on Groups of Interest,” he responded. “And this is not the place where you will find out. My identity remains hidden, cloaked behind countless veils to the point where I am not even entirely sure myself. My motives? They're even more ambiguous. I don't stand anywhere morally, at least not for any significant amount of time. I jump around between organisations like they're beaches on a hot day. And do I even have an identity? I am many.”
I was enraged at what Nobody had said. He has stalked me using whatever he could use and knew everything I did. He came to me to taunt me, to tell me I would never get anywhere.
In a brief outburst of rage, I grabbed Nobody's trench coat. Ignoring his cries for me to let go, I began to tear apart the vertical column of buttons separating me from his body. When I got closer to revealing his identity, he screamed in rage. The ear-splitting scream no longer sounded angry, he sounded desperate. It almost felt like the scream was erupting from his entire body, not just his open mouth. I was not affected by this outburst: figuring out anything about this man was my lifelong ambition.
As I tore open the final button, I grabbed the now-torn trench coat off of Nobody's slender shoulders. What was left in front of me was even more shocking than any theory I could have come up with myself.
Below me lay three small figures. I removed a small flashlight from my pocket and focused its yellow beam on the shapes. Each one was a young child, approximately eight years in age. Before I could consider the implications of this, each of the youths had vanished into the darkness.
I had discovered the true identity of Nobody, but (typical of this character) a question remained. How had I believed this misshapen beast had in fact been a human being with a regular appearance? I presented the trench coat I had retained to Foundation personnel upon my reentry to the site. Following close examination, it was discovered that a very similar anomaly had already been contained, and that there could be even more of the same item in circulation. The total amount was unclear and remains so, but at least I had answered the question I had set out to answer:
Nobody was three kids in a trench coat.


Raddagher

More by this author | Find Us Alive Hub

Humanity has yet to kick its god-building habit.
Everybody loves a legend. Everybody loves a story about someone unbelievable and extraordinary, a body and mind behind an impossible event or a terrible tragedy. Worship is an intrinsic symptom of being human; not one of us reaches the end without exalting something.
Dr. Xi Chen knew this well. Not consciously, but his bones were made of the same ancient stuff most humans were made of, and his bones knew. He was not different from other people. Like the strong majority of his peers, he was smart and articulate and quick to pull up a chair at a break room table when he caught someone beginning a story about one of the Foundation's more notorious staff. It reminded him of a time when he was a kid and he brought his Egyptology book to school, the other children crowding around him to get a look at the thick, shiny pages as he flipped through them with the reverence and carefulness of an archaeologist leafing through an actual ancient relic and not just a children's imitation of one.
The excitement was the same when a colleague burst through a door, breathlessly announcing “Guess who I just saw?!” Beyond the clearance levels, a tiered system always existed within the Foundation. A handful of staff always rose to a certain godhood, their status as legendary figures cemented by the astonishingly brave or staggeringly brilliant or shockingly insane things they had done.
One such legend was Dr. Rose Hatcher.
Dr. Hatcher always kept a grip on Chen's imagination; she was easily one of his favorites. Everyone he knew had heard an iteration of the story that made her famous, the time she saved a few dozen lives during a breach by crafting a bomb out of a toaster oven and a Konica copy machine. As it jumped from one teller to the next the story warped and changed, sometimes a printer, sometimes a mini fridge, sometimes a blender instead of a toaster oven, but despite the thousand different tellings everyone agreed on one thing: Dr. Hatcher could MacGyver her way out of any situation.
Sharp instincts, nimble fingers, and an incredible knowledge of physics endowed Hatcher with abilities to craft solutions to any problem. The Foundation found her work invaluable. Frequently she received calls from panicked field agents, seeking answers from the master of quick thinking and functional un-fixedness, and she would listen to them describe their surroundings and map them in her brain before calmly describing a way out or around or through. She was unshakable. Unflappable. No impossible case could stump her. Some thought her ability uncanny, some thought it anomalous. Most thought she was just very, very smart.
Chen heard all this secondhand, naturally. Almost everything he knew about her he learned from the wide-eyed accounts relayed by his fellow lower-level researchers. But once, when he was carrying a pile of printer toner boxes from one location to a different location, he had seen her with his own eyes. He peered around his tower of cardboard and watched her yell at an intern, some poor bastard who had clearly fucked up something, although he wasn't close enough to hear what it was. But she was there, down the hall, seeming to shine with some sort of electric energy that sparked off her movements and expressions. The encounter still lit a childish giddiness in him and he wasted no time rushing to finish his duties and tell his friends so they could argue and hypothesize about what the intern had done to set her off. It was fun. Harmless gossip about someone they all both feared and admired. She didn't seem real.
Not then, at least. She certainly felt real now.
He wasn't paying attention when he rounded the corner. His earbuds sang some 3-year-old radio song into his head and he couldn't hear over the familiar tune. He bumped into someone. The impact and the suddenness forced a strange, cutoff grunt of surprise from his chest, followed by the chaotic clattering of office supplies against a hard linoleum floor and the hollow resonant shatter of a terracotta pot.
There wasn't much spilled onto the floor, but Not Much mixed with a decent amount of potting soil is still a bitch to clean. Chen immediately began scooping the dirt from the aloe plant's broken pot into his hands, unsure of what else to do with it but very sure that he didn't want to make the janitors' jobs any harder. A flush of embarrassment bled into his ears.
“God, I'm so sorry-”
Hands full of dirt and terracotta shards, Chen looked up to meet the eyes of Dr. Hatcher, who was staring with casual disinterest at the mess on the floor through the hole in the bottom of the copy box she was holding in both arms.
The nervous heat in his face turned to a sickening burn.
Chen rocketed to his feet, both hands still cupping soil and terracotta like he was planning on relocating the plant there. Something firing in his brain told him to do something to make the whole situation less completely mortifying, and something else in his brain told him that the first something of his brain was an idiot, and the way to fix the problem was by standing slack-jawed and rigid as a post in the middle of the hallway. His body agreed with the second something.
It felt like a hundred years before Dr. Hatcher took a deep breath and then heaved a long sigh. But as soon as she did, the dam was broken.
“Jesus, shit, I'm so sorry, don't worry about it let me get it it's myfaultanywayjustletmecleanitupI'msosorryI'manidiotletme-”
“Kid.”
He stopped. Her voice had smoke damage.
“It's fine.”
She did genuinely seem to think it was fine. Or perhaps she simply didn't care enough to do anything to him about it. Or to do anything about it at all, really. She just stood there, staring down at the mess on the floor. Chen stood there as well, staring at her.
She was old. Not old old, but older than he thought she would be. Or maybe she just looked older than he thought she would look. Her hair brushed with wires of silver sneaking into the coily black curls. A deep crease between her eyebrows, two more on either side of her pursed lips. Her eyes were deep and dark, but they lacked the fierce spark of intelligence he'd always expected he'd see there, if he ever got as close as he was now. And she stared at the ground past the broken bottom of the cardboard copy box, the look on her face something quiet and weary.
Chen stumbled over words once more, tongue thick and clumsy. “Um, Dr. Hatcher-”
At the sound of her name Dr. Hatcher looked up, meeting his eyes. He looked for the spark. He did not find it.
“My name's, uh, my name's Dr. Chen. I work up on the fourth floor.”
She blinked.
"It's an honor to meet you," he said.
I'm a big fan, he did not say.
“Mm.” Dr. Hatcher said.
Dr. Chen bent to his knees again, this time making a much more earnest effort to clean up the floor. He began scooping potting soil into the corner of his lab coat. It didn't matter, he had extras. This one wasn't even his favorite. Dr. Hatcher resigned herself to the social convention that dictated she shouldn't leave him to clean it all up by himself. The smell of the dirt was a short respite from the usual pungence of the bleach cleaner. Something a little less sterile and a little more real.
Chen picked up a piece of the broken pot and turned it over in his palm. It was painted on the outside, by hand. He could see the raised line where the gold spray-paint had bunched up against the edge of the tape. A few strokes of teal and white, but those were brush-painted instead of sprayed. He felt a smile crawl nervously onto his face.
“Hey, did you make-”
His sentence was cut off by the clanking rattle of Hatcher picking up the dislodged aloe plant off the ground and tossing it unceremoniously into a nearby trash can, the soil hissing as it shook through the plastic liner.
Chen's mouth popped open, like maybe he might protest throwing out a perfectly good aloe plant, but as soon as it opened, it shut again. Hatcher picked up a crumpled lab coat from its position balled up on the floor, shook out the loose bits of soil and began gathering the other unbroken items into it. She looked a bit like a parent cleaning up after a difficult toddler, but at the same time she looked a little like a teenager packing sentimental items into a backpack before a half-hearted and ill-conceived shot at running away. Framed photographs and multi-tools and sandwich bags full of differently-sized screws, all of these she gathered into her white lab coat bindle. The sight of her crouched on the floor made Chen's stomach feel strange. Like there was a hole in it.
He shook off the feeling. He was standing in the presence of his hero, for God's sake. He was going to milk that for all it was worth, as long as they were still connected by the thread of the mess on the floor. That included dumping the dirt in his hands into the trash can after the aloe plant, but pocketing one of the painted fragments of the pot.
“So, what's all this for?” He wasn't expecting a real answer, not really, merely something he could grab onto. A little hint at an adventure he wasn't allowed to know about, a few words he could use to spin into some sort of narrative he could regale his friends with. It didn't have to be much.
And it wasn't.
“I'm quitting.”
The hole became a pit.
The instinct not to pry dissolved with his shame. “What? Why?! You can't quit! We need you, the Foundation needs you. You've done incredible work here.”
Hatcher gave a shrug, standing up with her bundle of belongings and the shell of her copy box. She didn't radiate any sort of energy. She mostly looked tired. “Don't like the way things are run. Don't want to be a part of it anymore.” She threw the words away. They landed heavy and cold in Chen's chest. “It's not worth it for me. And I'm not important enough for them to really have a shot in fighting to keep me around. Going down to Amnestics to get some new memories, and then I'm out of here forever.”
The deepening void in Chen's belly became a writhing monster .
“But- you can't do that! You can't- you can't just leave. What about everything you've done? What about all the people you've helped?”
“Hopefully you'll help them now.”
It wasn't a call to action. It wasn't a handing-off of any sort of noble mantle, from a weathered veteran to a bright-eyed rookie. It was a dry acknowledgement of the fact that, after Dr. Hatcher, there were other people. Replacements.
Chen asked the only question he could. “What will you do?”
Dr. Hatcher's hard face softened for a split second, her eyes momentarily distant as she saw something he couldn't.
“Live on the beach.”
And with that, she walked past him, her figure (not as imposing as it ought to be) shrinking as she left down the hall. And then she opened a door, and then she was gone.
Chen's feet rooted him to the linoleum. His left hand was wet and warm, and bloody, he would learn upon looking at it. He had gripped the piece of pottery so hard that the edge had bit into his palm. Wiping the red off with his thumb, Chen studied the paint. Fake gold, a thin film of it. Like his Egyptology book.
There was hydrogen peroxide in his dormitory. He would go wash the blood out of his coat and pants. That's what he would do now.
It was fresh, which means it came out easily, but Chen kept scrubbing anyway. He worked the hard cotton of his lab coat against itself, squeezing out a stain that wasn't there anymore. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the fabric with both hands, his fingers growing raw from the friction. But the negligible sting in his hands felt less terrible than the way his insides were wringing themselves into knots.
He felt angry. He felt a lot of things. Anger, confusion, shock. Heartbreak, maybe.
But the one that hurt the most, and took the longest to identify, was disappointment.
Part of him wanted to march down to Amnestics himself and get the last couple hours erased from his mind, but he knew his reasoning was childish and a little pathetic and the people down there would not be impressed. The image stood out on the insides of his eyelids. When he blinked he could see her, shoveling office supplies into the dirty lab coat in her arms. He wanted to see her in action. He wanted to see her at her peak, talking quickly and clearly through a radio, flicking out a pocket screwdriver, pulling back her wild hair before getting to work. Not wincing and rubbing her lower back after standing up from kneeling on the floor. Not carrying a cardboard paper box full of the last dregs of her shamefully erasable career. Not exhausted and resigned and aging.
She wasn't supposed to be like that. She was supposed to be indestructible. She was supposed to be legendary.
He knew she was a human, he just didn't want to be confronted with the fact that she was human.
Because the higher-ups, the 4's and 5's, they had to be different. They couldn't just be people. They couldn't just be humans, who got wrinkles and head-colds, who forgot their keys and their siblings' birthdays, who were once children with favorite books, maybe even the kind with shiny gold foil on the cover. Because if they were just humans, that would mean the Foundation wasn't run by gods, or legends, or exceptionally special people, just regular, ordinary people. It meant the fate of humanity was in the hands of people who were not different from him, not really. People whose bones were made of the same stuff his were.
And Dr. Xi Chen, clutching a wet lab coat and a piece of broken pottery, felt very small and very large at the same time.


The Investor moved through the halls of The Factory as if he was a part of it. Each lunging step was stilted, almost forced, like the turning of a rusted cog. The Rust - the horrible, alchemical Rust that was the very essence of The Factory - covered him completely, inside and out. It sloughed from his ragged finery with every movement and exuded from his mouth with each exhalation, word, or cough. Every organ, every blood vessel, every synapse was saturated with the Rust, so much so that a mortal man would have died from it long ago. Nothing that he did or felt or thought was purely his own anymore, for it was all under the sage guidance of the Rust. Only his veiled eyes remained untainted, shocking orbs of white and black and purple against the rusty red barnacles that enveloped his face.
The unending racket of the machines and the soft, desperate, yet hopeless weeping of the workers became more distant as the Investor descended further beneath the main floor; though, no matter where one went in The Factory, these sounds could never be escaped completely. He was underground now, but that made little difference as the entire Factory was bereft of any natural light. Furnace fires and incandescent bulbs behind iron bars were the only light most Factory workers ever saw.
The crying of hungry infants, the dejected sobs of toddlers, and the forlorn silence of their mothers greeted the Investor as he walked through the breeding pits. At one pit a pair of hooded Facilitators hoisted children old enough to work up with a rusted chain around their ankles. Two pits down from that a tall and faceless Eidolonic security guard disciplined one of the breeders for some petty offence, while at another the unbearably inhuman form of a Foreman simply glared down, occasionally jotting something down on a clipboard.
The Investor gave a tacit nod of approval at all of this as he strode past, ducking his tall form to fit into the service elevator. It did not descend smoothly, but rather in rhythmic jolts, gears squealing and sparking as it did so, until it reached the bottom-most level of The Factory; the detention level. The Eidolonic guards posted at the entrance wasted no time on pleasantries, merely hurrying him through the sets of corroded iron bars and taking him to the interrogation chamber. He saw the prisoner, a beaten and bloodied man bound by a chain wrapped around him like an anaconda. Standard operating procedure for an interrogation, of course, but there was one curiosity that stood out to the Investor: though the man was hung upside-down, his face was the right way up.
Calliope music, enticing from afar. The ticking of a punch clock, more enticing still, the Investor ‘spoke'. By this, he meant, more or less, ‘Welcome home, Manny,'.

“Before we start, I need you to answer a very important question; am I a cartoon?” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V asked, staring at a reality-measuring Kant counter with a needle that wobbled erratically whenever she pointed it at herself.
It was, perhaps, a valid question. Physically, she fit the profile of a ‘noodle person', and her light brown skin tone left her ethnicity completely ambiguous, possibly to maximize her appeal to a growingly diverse audience. That sounded like something the Board of Directors would do. The nature of her relationship with her assistant Emma was equally ambiguous, another likely tactic to expand her target audience to all ideological demographics. She was also wearing a top hat, and she read somewhere that top hats weren't real but merely anti-capitalist propaganda from IngSoc. Finally, she was surrounded by several corgis (all named Jeremy), which obviously weren't a real breed of dog. That was not up for debate.
“No. Cartoonish, maybe, but there's nothing wrong with that,” The Man With The Upside-Down Face assured her. “Some of my best friends pride themselves on being as cartoonish as ontologically possible.”
“So, I'm real?”
“I didn't say that.”
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V glared at the Kant counter suspiciously, tapping the gauge in confusion, but reluctantly set it down on her desk.
"I think I had a dream I was a cartoon. Or, somebody else dreamed I was. It's not important. Not really. The story matters more than the medium, don't you think?"
“Undoubtedly,” Manny nodded. “Dr. Wondertainment -”
“Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V,” she insisted. “A man without a name should know how important they are.”
“Believe me, I do. It's why I'm here,” he said, taking his hat off and holding it over his chest. “I owe a favour to a pair of Seelie twins, and they've asked that I go into The Factory to recover a stolen Fey Name. I can't infiltrate The Factory again, and breaking in alone would be… I was going to say suicide, but I know they won't kill me. They'd…”
“I know what happens at The Factory. They're butts,” she said, scrunching her face up in childish disdain.
“See, that's why I need you; your inextinguishable Wonderlight,” Manny explained. “Back when you were Reggie -”
“Dr. Reginald Philbert Lionel Archibald Westinghouse Wondertainment III.”
“- You worked at The Factory for three years without ever losing your Wonderlight. I know you've been back there since. You've been to The Darkness Below, and even that couldn't break you. No matter how horrible things get, you never lose your drive to make something Wondrous. I need you if I have any hope of getting out of The Factory with my soul intact."
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V opened her mouth and raised her finger to speak, but was interrupted by the sound of a shop-vac. Emma was sucking up blobs of self-replicating silly putty that Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V had created and then subsequently lost interest in.
“Emma, can you do that later? I'm actually doing very important business stuff for once,” she shouted over the sound of the vacuum.
“I believe I was very clear when I explained the existential threat of unchecked exponential growth to you,” Emma shouted, solely because she was angry. Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V rolled her twinkling, lavender, vaguely anime-style eyes and turned back to Manny.
"My apologies for my assistant's obsessive cleanliness and safeguarding of human civilization," she yelled. "To save my voice-box I'll get straight to the point. I hate the Factory, and I love your Circus. I would have loved to have done something with you guys sooner, but the Wonder World Tee Emm situation made it kind of confusing. That being said, a full-frontal assault on The Factory is a bit much for a first date. How about instead I do an expo at your Circus? I have dozens of prototypes I know I can get the Board to sign off on if I can just show them there's a public interest.”
Manny reached into his jacket and pulled out a chrome ray-gun and tossed it onto the desk in front of her. It was bulky, covered in useless blinking lights, with a spinning W on the top. Emma stopped vacuuming at the sight of it, and Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V was nearly rendered speechless.
“Is, is that…?” she stammered.
“Doctor Wondertainment's Hyper Fun Sun Gun, Tee Emm. One of only seven prototypes you ever made,” Manny nodded. “I was told you no longer have any of your own left.”
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V shook her head.
“The metal is from a universe that doesn't exist anymore that had some weird quirks of physics,” she told him. “Plus, the focusing crystal was grown from cane sugar, and the Board will only approve the acquisition of high-fructose corn syrup these days. Where'd you get it?”
“Fuller acquired it from Reggie back in the fifties. It got left behind during his rather abrupt retirement from show business,” Manny explained. “In your hands, that thing's a weapon of mass destruction against The Factory. You're welcome to keep it, so long as you help me get that Name first.”
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V reverently picked up the toy gun. Though she had made it a lifetime ago, part of her still recognized it, and it seemed to recognize her as well. At the slightest brush of her fingers, it charged with so much Wonderlight it began to glow and vibrate, the W spinning so fast it was an indistinguishable blur.
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V smiled the biggest smile since she had invented thaumo-nuclear Heelys two days prior.
“Jeremy, get the hot air balloon ready!”

A clash of thunder, bold and brash. The swinging of a pendulum, quiet yet constant.
“For the last time, I have no idea what the hell you're saying!” Manny shouted back at the Investor. The Investor gestured to the Facilitator at the winch, who hoisted Manny up higher so that they were both eye to eye.
A mighty blast furnace drowning out the weeping of children, the cracking of charred bones in the flames.
“That's a threat, I take it? Well, you're out of luck. I know you're never letting me go, and never letting me die either, so I'm stuck in hell either way. And everyone I care about is safe at the Circus, which can't be found by anyone who's not supposed to find it. Go on and do whatever you want to me. I'm not telling you anything.”
The Investor made a noise that Manny took to be a mechanical approximation of laughter.
The sounds of a carnival, omnipresent yet unplaceable. The dark child sings to find her way back.
The door to the interrogation chamber was forced open, revealing a figure standing in the shadowed hall. Manny strained to make them out in the dim light, but saw that they were human, a woman. She wasn't a worker though, for she was far too well-kempt and healthy-looking. She was of average height and build with black bobbed hair and a pale complexion, seemingly a perfectly unremarkable young lady. Her presence here baffled Manny, and so he naturally tried to peer into her mind for answers.

‘Wolves asleep amidst the trees
Bats all a swaying in the breeze
But one soul lies anxious wide awake
Fearing all manner of ghouls, hags and wraiths.'

His gaze was instantly deflected by the eerie lullaby, preventing him from looking any deeper than her surface thoughts. Whoever she was, she knew how to safeguard her mind. Forced to rely solely on his mortal senses, Manny took another look at her. It was then that he noticed that her eyes were the same deep purple as the Investor's, that her left hand was some sort of non-standard Cogwork, and that she was wearing a turtleneck.
“Dark,” he mouthed in horror. Out of sheer survival instinct, he focused all his power into trying to break through her defences.

‘For your dolly, Polly, sleep has flown
Don't dare let her tremble alone
For the Witcher, heartless, cold
Paid in coin of gold
He comes, he'll go, leave naught behind
But heartache and woe
Deep, deep, woe.'

Manny screamed at the backlash from the attack, his convulsing body rattling his chains.
“Excellent. I've never tested that in an actual fight before,” Iris smirked as she sauntered into the chamber. “Thank you ever so much. If that works against you, it'll work against pretty much anything.”
“Why are you here?” Manny asked hoarsely, blood dripping from his nose.
"To be frank, I was starting to get a little offended with how much effort you were putting into avoiding me," she replied, folding her arms across her chest. "Every time I visit your Circus, you're not there. So when my Uncle Black calls me and says that you've been caught breaking into his Factory and he wants my help getting some information out of you, I was more than happy to oblige. He's my Uncle, by the way. Great Uncle, technically. I've got a lot of those.”
The Investor gestured to the winch operator once again, and Manny was lowered so that Iris could look down upon him.
“You owe my Family Name your very being. You know where Nameless things end up, and it's only because of my Grandsire's skill with Nominative Magic that you're able to walk the planes freely,” she reminded him. “The least you could do is show a little gratitude.”
“I'll do no such thing,” Manny laughed between bloody coughs.
“I've been studying the power of True Names too, you know. Among other things,” Iris boasted with an indifferent tilt of her head. “And you know my Name gives me power over you. So, you can either tell us why you came here of your own volition, or you can be my guinea pig for some Nomenclative spells I'd like to try. What's it going to be, Manny?”
He convulsed at her speaking of his nickname. It may not have held all of his being, but it held a great deal, enough for anyone named Dark to reduce him to an unrecognizable shell of his full self. He felt Iris pluck the web of thoughts and memories and feelings that made up Manny, sending metaphysical vibrations shaking throughout his ego. He screamed in delirious agony, and out of desperate self-preservation lashed out at Iris's mind once again.

‘Birds are silent for the night
Cows turned in as daylight dies
But one soul lies anxious wide awake
Fearing all manner of ghouls, hags and wraiths.'

The lullaby reverberated throughout his skull, echoing seemingly without end and drowning out all thought. When it finally died to a dull ringing, Iris gave him a direct order.
“Tell us why you came here, Manny.”

“Say what you will about The Factory (and I do), but at least they had the courtesy to set up somewhere sparsely inhabited,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V remarked as they looked down upon the monolithic smokestacks and sharply angled roofs of rusted sheet metal from their hot air balloon.
There were thousands of Factories scattered across the Worlds, but this was where it had all began, and remained the central node of their industrial empire. Thirteen storeys tall, and so immense it dwarfed even the fabled Anderson Factory. The smokestacks rose even higher, and yet the soot they let fall had long since turned every brick of the outer walls a deep jet black. The flatlands surrounding The Factory were bloody rust red in contrast, the Rust itself seeping out from The Factory and spreading like a glacier in all directions. Hung above The Factory were three large, red suns, and yet the sky was somehow an impenetrably gloomy black.
The balloon itself was less than inconspicuous, crafted in the likeness of Jeremy wearing a purple Wondertainment tuxedo and top hat.
“Actually Ma'am, I'm pretty sure they're the reason this World is so barren,” Emma commented as she readied a length of rope for her and Manny's descent.
“Let's not turn this into an allegory about Climate Change, everyone's already burnt out on that,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V claimed, peering through a telescope at the desolate landscape. “Though honestly, it's amazing the smog hasn't suffocated their entire workforce. An asphyxiated worker is not a busy worker.”
She collapsed the telescope and stuck it into her coat, scanning with her naked eye for any sign that they had been detected.
“They really can't see us, can they?” she asked Manny, who had provided them with their pretermemetic stealth.
“Technically, it's more that they can't remember seeing us long enough to be consciously aware of it,” he replied, hoisting a sack of supplies over his back. “Try not to draw any attention to yourself once we're in though. Some of the things in there are more resistant to my talents than others. Remember: we need to make our way to the treasury. Seventh floor, roughly in the middle. Ideally, I'll be able to snatch the location of the Fey Names from the mind of someone working there, but if not, the valuables should be fairly well organized and not give us too much trouble. If we get separated, don't come after me. Just grab the rabbit's Name, take it to Fata Morgana and ask for the Levainn sisters.”
“I don't know anything about Nominative Magic. How am I supposed to know what Name is his?” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V asked.
“Arf!” Jeremy barked helpfully in response.
“Oh, you can't smell a Name Jeremy.”
“Arf!”
“I know you know what rabbits smell like, but he wasn't a rabbit when he lost his Name so that doesn't help.”
“Arf!”
“Yes, quantum biology is involved in scent. That doesn't mean scent molecules stay entangled with their source for over a hundred years! You're really making me regret buying you that physics major.”
"I've been told his Name will smell like raspberries, or snapdragons," Manny informed them. "It will be a good Name, a proud Name, or at least would have been once. Hopefully, that's enough for you to go on."
“We're in position Ma'am,” Emma said as she lowered the rope down the inactive, derelict chimney they had come to rest over. The four of them peered down over the edge of the basket into the blackened, soot-caked, seemingly infinite pit beneath.
"You ready, Doc?" Manny asked, pulling down his hood and balaclava to conceal himself.
“That's Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V, and now that we're literally staring into the abyss there's one thing I want to know,” she replied. “Why are you willing to break into The Factory for these girls?”
“I told you. I owe them a favour.”
“Must be a pretty a big favour. Spill it.”
Manny sighed, but nodded reluctantly.
“There was somebody close to me that Fuller wanted dead,” he explained. “The Levainn sisters changed her Name and smuggled her through Fata Morgana so that Fuller couldn't track her. They saved her life when I couldn't, and in exchange, I promised them anything, even if it meant sacrificing my own life. I'm not about to go back on my word. I may be a man without a Name, but I still have a reputation to think about.”
“Really? That's it?” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V asked disappointedly. “I like my motivation better.”
"Harbouring a multi-lifetime animosity for The Factory that's become so all-consuming you're willing to risk your life just to deal them the pettiest slight?" he asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Bingo,” she winked, stuffing Jeremy into her coat. With the ray gun in one hand and the rope in the other, she leapt out of the hot air balloon and disappeared into the inky black smokestack. “Workers of the Worlds Unite!”

“I came here to keep a promise,” Manny grunted, obeying the command while still giving her nothing. Iris chuckled respectfully at his resolve, but the Investor seemed to be getting irritated.
Sputters of a dying engine. The searing of a hot branding iron against rotting flesh.
“I disagree. Escalating the interrogation risks killing him before we get what we want,” she claimed, though Manny could swear he detected a hint of dishonesty in her voice. “Attrition is our best tactic. He can't keep this up much longer. Can you, Manny?”
Manny tensed again at the pull of Nominative Magic, but this time he did not feel so helpless. He may not have had any power over the name Dark, but if she could use a nickname against him, perhaps he could do the same to her.
“Young Lady, while you obviously have no small talent for this, I have what amounts to literally two average human lifetimes at dealing with all the pitfalls and challenges of not having a Name,” he replied, hoping the name would be too generic for her to notice it. “You're going to tire of this long before I do.”
"Possibly, but unlike you, I have the option of going to replenish my reserves," she answered to the name. "Thirst and hunger and sleep deprivation will drain your strength soon enough. I'm going to get what I want eventually, I always do, so why not make this easier on yourself?"
“As old Charley used to say, ‘because fuck you, that's why,' Young Lady,” he said defiantly. Iris seemed pensive for a moment, and he feared that the namedrop may have been too blatant.
drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip drip every last drop.
“You know, in spite of his advanced age, my Uncle here isn't as patient as I am,” the Young Lady told him. “He values efficiency too highly. You keep grinding his gears like this, and he might do something we'll all regret. I don't want that any more than you do.”
Twice now she had answered to the name, and that made it hers.
“Well, aren't you a considerate Young Lady,” Manny smiled. The Young Lady's face went pale at the immediate intrusion into her mind.
“You son of a bitch,” she cursed, and then began singing out loud.

“My dear dolly Polly shut your eyes
Lie still, lie silent, utter no cries
As the Witcher, brave and bold
Paid in coin of gold
He'll chop and slice you
Cut and dice you
Eat you up whole.”

The psionic reverberation grew so intense Manny briefly lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, he saw the Young Lady smiling smugly at him.
“Eat you whole,” she finished. “Are you done now, or would you prefer an encore?”
"I'm done. I got what I needed," he replied, looking up at the Investor. "She's lying to you, you know. She's not going to let you keep me. Mickey D's wants me all to themselves."
Ear-piercing screeching.
"Uncle, please, stay calm," the Young Lady urged. "He's lying. Obviously, we would rather maintain good relations with The Factory than the Circus."
"Is it obvious?" Manny asked. "Just like The Factory, we've got Eldritch Abominations galore, but unlike them, we never stay in one place for long. The Factory's management can be trusted to be coldly rational and never do anything that might cost them a profit. You can't say the same of Icky. Plus, our deal to let you use our Kaleidoscope has been more profitable than any deal you have right now with The Factory. We're better business partners and would make far more dangerous enemies. Not to mention that Darke liked Fuller, he still likes the Circus, and you - I can't believe I'm saying this - you actually think of Lolly as a friend. She'll be so touched."
The Young Lady carefully considered her response.
“… She's grown on me, I guess,” she admitted grudgingly. “Alright then Uncle, I admit it. Manny's vital to the Circus's operations, we need the Circus operational, and our claim on him long predates yours. You can't keep him.”
The sound of stained-glass shattering, the screams of those below as they are cut and blinded by the shards.
“I know he broke in here, and we will compensate you for that, but -”
A Young Lady screaming in perpetual childbirth, the clanking of her chains as she uselessly tries to reclaim the life she's lost.
The two of them stared each other down with rapidly growing animosity.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked in cold defiance. Without warning, his withered and rusted claw of a hand shot forward, grabbing her bionic arm in a vice-like a grip. The Rust immediately spread from his shell of a body to the prosthetic, infecting it within seconds.
The Young Lady screamed in pain, then in anger, and then in horror when she realized what the Rust would do to her. The Rust could not spread to the rest of her body so easily, but the arm now acted as a second brain, flooding her nervous system with commands from The Factory. She collapsed to the floor as the fight for her own body and mind took everything she had.
“You bastard! You bastard!” the Young Lady screamed, hot tears pouring down her face.
“A Young Lady should not use such language,” the Investor mocked, taking advantage of the Rust's focus on her to speak freely.
“My, my name is Iris Dark. My name is Iris Dark. My name is Iris Dark. My name is Iris Dark. My name is Iris Dark.”
Clutching her infected hand, she looked up in hatred at Manny, as he looked upon her with pity and remorse.
“I know it is, Ms. Dark. I meant no disrespect," he apologized, releasing her from the Nomenclative binding.
Iris sighed in mild relief, having one less problem to deal with. The mental screaming from her arm now faced a little more resistance, which meant she had a little more time.
“You, you didn't do anything I wouldn't have done in your place,” she admitted. “It's still your fault I'm here at all. What the bloody hell were you thinking, breaking in here by yourself?”
Her answer came in the form of a ruckus outside, made out of screaming and yelling and ray gun blasting and corgi barking.
“I may not be as smart as you, Ms. Dark, but do you really think I'm dumb enough to break in here alone?” Manny smiled.
The Investor threw open the door to the interrogation chamber, only for Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V to whiz past him on her thaumo-nuclear powered Heelys.
"Manny there you are sorry I lost you but Jeremy and I used a trench coat to pose as a Foreman and found out where the Names are but then Jeremy sneezed and Foremen don't sneeze so our cover was blown so we had to fight our way out and I know you said not to come after you but Jeremy picked up the scent of carnie corndogs on you and corndogs are his favourite so he led me here and why is your face the right-way-up?" she blurted out with a pronounced doppler effect as she zoomed by.
Iris looked up at him dumbfounded for a moment.
“Why her?” she asked in equal parts bewilderment and irritation.
“Wondertainment's the exact opposite of The Factory, and no one alive is more Wondertainmenty than Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V,” he grinned.
A toyshop's bell chiming impotently against the dauntless hammering of industry, the Investor screamed as he ran after Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V.
“Can you actually understand what he says?” Manny asked.
“I was largely guessing by his tone,” Iris admitted.
There was a flash of bright light, and they heard the Investor scream; a completely ordinary, human scream, and then nothing but liberated Rust particles wafting in through the open door. They were followed by Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V, a beacon of colour against the monotonous russet brown of The Factory, and her loyal dog Jeremy.
“Good boy, good boy,” she praised her corgi as she casually incinerated the Facilitator by the winch lever. “Manny, I never would have found you without Jeremy, this place is a literal Labyrinth. Who's the young lady?”
“Iris Dark!” Iris screamed, only for Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V to blink at her in confusion.
“…Am I supposed to know who that is?”
“Her bionic hand's been infected with Rust. Can you fix it?” Manny asked. Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V knelt to examine Iris's arm while Jeremy jumped up and down at the winch lever.
“Oh yeah, this has barely even set in, nothing the Hyper Fun Sun Gun Tee Emm can't handle,” she said nonchalantly. “…Hold still.”
“Wait, what are you -” before Iris could finish, Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V blasted her arm with her ray gun, the blinding white beam scouring the Rust instantly. Iris was rendered speechless by the shock, rage, and then relief of being free of The Factory's influence.
“Better?”
“…It's still broken,” she murmured, feeling her heart drop as her hand would only open and close sporadically. She was torn out of her self-pity by the sound of Manny thudding against the floor, Jeremy having been successful at releasing him from the chain.
“Good dog!” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V praised him.
“No, bad dog. Bad dog!” Manny growled as he sloughed off the chains and rose to his feet. “Did you find the rabbit's Name?”
Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V reached into her pocket and pulled out a small parchment scroll bound by a seal with The Factory's logo on it, labelled in a barcode-like language of rigid lines, dashes, and square dots.
"You tell me," she said, handing it to him. Manny smelled the scroll, the scent of raspberries and snapdragons overwhelming his nostrils. It had some heft to it, like it was a good Name. A proud Name. Memories of the Name's former owner poured into his mind, and he had no doubt it was the Name he had come for.
“It's the right Name. Good work,” he commended her, shoving it into his pocket.
“Jeremy found it,” she said, gesturing to the dog looking up at him expectantly.
“Alright, fine, good dog. But we need to go,” he said urgently. “Dark, can you walk?”
“I can manage,” she said half-heartedly, forcing herself to her feet.
“Oh, the balloon won't run with four. She stays behind,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V said gravely. Manny and Iris glared at her in disbelief, only for her to break down laughing. “Sorry, my attempt at dark humour. The balloon will work fine. Let's go.”
They rushed out into the hall, now littered with the bodies of Eidolonics and Facilitators, and quickly piled into the still-open service elevator.
“Top floor please,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V requested politely.
“That's not how -” Iris began, only for the elevator to chime pleasantly, ascend smoothly, and play some upbeat techno-pop music. “What?”
“Elevators are always nice to me,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V explained. “I think it's because I always end up breaking escalators, and they regard escalators as their natural enemies.”
The elevator promptly arrived at the top floor, sliding open to reveal The Factory was in chaos. Machinery laid in ruins from the Hyper Fun Sun Gun™, Facilitators and Gremlins had abandoned their posts, and Eidolonics and Foremen were trying to put down a worker uprising.
“Did you do all of this?” Manny asked in disbelief.
“Jeremy did at least half of it. I'm the one who inspired the revolt though. It wasn't even hard. Thanks to Wonder World Tee Emm, I'm literally the saviour they've been dreaming of.”
“What were you even doing up here?”
“We got lost. It's hard for a girl and her dog to navigate when they're sharing a trench coat.”
The conversation was interrupted by the Eldritch shrieking of a Foreman, pointing its vile tentacle at them. Only the Eidolonics seem to heed the command, fighting their way through the pandemonium towards the elevator. Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V shot a blast from her ray gun at the tattling Foreman, reducing him to festering, gelatinous sludge.
“Emma's waiting for us on the other side of the far wall. Follow me,” she ordered as she skated ahead on her Heelys, leaping over and around and under anything in her path. She decimated any Eidolonic she got a clear shot at and blew up any machines she had missed on her first go through, each of them exploding into showers of yellow pus and burning shrapnel, respectively.
Iris quickly leapt onto Manny's back, wrapping her remaining functional arm around his neck. He wasn't exactly in running shape either, and certainly not in fighting shape, but the surrounding chaos combined with Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V's extremely distracting behaviour was enough to ensure that the two of them remained unnoticed.
“Stop right there, Manny!”
Or so he thought.
Manny turned around to see a shotgun pointed at him. The man holding it was human, but he didn't look Factory-born. He was also far too old and healthy to be an assembly line worker, and his long frock coat and leather waistcoat indicated he was paid in more than bowls of gruel.
“What in God's name have you done?”
“What are you going to do, Adam? Shoot me? When The Factory's already tearing itself apart?” Manny asked.
The man cocked the gun, his answer clear.
“Hands up. Yours too young lady,” he ordered. Manny smiled as he felt the anger coursing through Iris's body.
“My Name is Dark,” she said coldly, a confirmation to herself as much as anything. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she began muttering incantations in the Chaos Tongue. Every corpse on The Factory floor (of which there were more than the usual amount) suddenly imploded into an occult singularity, with non-Euclidean ethereal tendrils whipping out in all directions, tearing down The Factory itself and everything in their way.
The man holding the gun was carelessly knocked aside, and Manny resumed his pursuit of Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V.
She was happily aiding and abetting Dark's occult tendrils, blasting apart everything she could while giggling like a schoolgirl on cocaine. When she finally reached the far wall, she took aim to destroy it, but before she could pull the trigger it was knocked down for her by the rapidly growing tentacles, along with a good chunk of the roof. For the first time since those walls went up, sunlight beamed into The Factory floor. When the Rust settled, a dangling rope offered them their salvation.
“Let's go!” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V ordered, using a rocket booster on her Heelys to blast herself to the rope. Manny grabbed hold as tightly as he could, and before he could even start climbing the balloon began moving up and away from The Factory.
When he and Dark climbed into the basket, Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V was looking gleefully through her telescope at the burning, rebelling, collapsing Factory.
“Well, all and all I think that went about as well as could be expected,” she claimed, shooting off the Hyper Fun Sun Gun™ one last time for good measure. “Emma, celebratory sodas for everyone!”
“I don't like fizzy drinks,” Iris muttered as she sat against the side of the basket, hugging her knees.
“It's for the Rust,” Emma told her, opening a bottle and handing it to her.
“Can't you just shoot me with that gun again?” she retorted, reluctantly accepting the drink. “Oh, and who the hell was that bloke with the shotgun?”
Manny shook his head as he chugged down nearly half his soda in one gulp.
“Another time,” he promised. Iris groaned, forcing herself to sip the sickly-sweet cola.
“Well Manny, thanks to you, my company has not only lost the business of The Factory but might end up going to war with them if they ever recover from this, my arm is broken, and I'll be triggered every time someone calls me young lady. Was it worth it?”
Manny reached into his pocket and pulled out the scroll, rolling it gently in his fingers.
“Yeah. I think it was,” he smiled.
“So, just so that we have our stories straight when we drop you off at the Circus,” Dr. Isabel Helga Anastasia Parvati Wondertainment V said as she poured her soda into a bowl for Jeremy. “What are we telling Icky about what happened?”
Manny froze for a moment, the colour draining from his face.
“Ah, crap.”

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Vivid Visions
~~ More Alan Stuff ~~

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 24/06/2024

Hello. Sorry for bothering you, but lately I've started to experience some problems with my mental health. I've been looking for some help and colleagues advised to contact you. I don't want to officially ask you for a therapy session, however. No need to make a fuss about it, and others don't have to know. They'll probably think I'm losing it.
Will you have time to help me? I was looking for something similar to my problem in various sources, but, unfortunately, without any results. I'll be waiting for your response. Thanks for your time.

FROM: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
TO: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
DATE: 25/06/2024

Hello Joseph! Of course, there is nothing wrong with sharing your problem through messages, if that'll be convenient for you. You can describe what's bothering you, and I'll try to help. Just keep in mind that if your problem turns out to be serious, we'll need to have a therapy session. There is nothing shameful in seeking help when you're struggling with mental issues. Most Foundation employees do so at some point in their careers.
I'll be waiting for your next message. Sorry in advance if I won't be able to write you a compelling answer on the same day. There has been a lot of work lately, but I'll try to attend to you as soon as possible.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 25/06/2024

Of course. I'll wait as long as necessary.
Basically, my problem is that I often experience, how should I put it… Obsessive visualizations. More specifically, I often see a place very similar to my current surroundings. Sometimes I can recognize my home, the streets I often walk on, or my workplace. Only in that place, everything looks very distorted and disfigured. There are no people, ruins everywhere, and everything is covered in piles of dust and dirt. As if for some reason everything was abandoned. Worst of all is the feeling that the whole world there is exactly like this. Creepy, empty and so… Alien, I guess.
This feeling has haunted me for about three weeks. It all started with ordinary thoughts, but over time they grew more and more obsessive. It got to the point where it became difficult for me to work since I couldn't concentrate, and I had to take more breaks. Recently, I began to see it in my dreams too, woke up screaming several times. But that's not all. How to explain, a few days ago it seemed like I saw it in reality as well. Maybe it's just the visualization was too strong, but I couldn't make myself unsee it. I've pinched myself, tried to touch something near me, even called somebody, but it didn't help. I got better only after an hour.
After that, I began to take sedatives every time those thoughts became unbearable, and sometimes sleeping pills so I won't have insomnia. It helped to an extent. But this problem still bothers me, I wouldn't want it to happen more often. Did you have such cases during your practice? Thanks.

FROM: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
TO: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
DATE: 27/06/2024

Hello. I'm sorry again for not being able to respond earlier.
What you're describing is pretty serious. Especially if this problem interferes with your normal life on a daily basis. But you should remember that there are no reasons to panic. You did the right thing by contacting me, and I will do my best to help you.
Let's think this through. Did these obsessive thoughts appear spontaneously, or they are somehow connected to any of your other experiences? Something like this can occur due to your brain's reaction to stress, which you're experiencing but cannot cope with. Think about what prompted you to visualize this “destroyed world” in the first place. Of course, this may be unpleasant, but if we understand the reason, we'll be able to find a way to deal with it.
I also strongly suggest we meet personally. It does not matter if your colleagues will find out about it. The problems of this kind should be treated immediately. Ignoring them might lead to very unpleasant consequences.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 28/06/2024

Thanks for your reply! Actually, yesterday it happened again. And this time, it lasted far longer: somewhere around two hours. You know, it's not even me being terrified or fearing for my own life. It's this feeling of hopelessness and, I guess, insignificance, that bothers me. When I see that place, it feels like everything there is lost and there is no way to change that. These thoughts literally got me shaking this time. Well, at least I left my sedatives nearby. I clearly took more than was necessary, but it helped to stop that nightmare.
But there's good news too. Your message prompted me to think about my condition, and I came to the conclusion that those problems can be somehow related to my work. You see, recently I used to often find myself thinking about some… Less pleasing aspects of this job. I mean, we face so many dangerous anomalies on a daily basis, and some of them aren't even fully studied, so we never truly know what to expect. In fact, all that is needed for a catastrophe to happen is one small mistake, say, made during an experiment with one of the objects, or some kind of miscalculation in the containment procedures. After all, there is always the human factor.
Sometimes I find it difficult to be confident in such conditions. I also remember those times when I was finding out about some weird things happening in other Sites. There was always a feeling that everything can collapse at any moment without any apparent reason. I think that taking part in experiments in this state also didn't help. Do you think there can be a connection?
Please forgive me if I take too much of your time. I think I'll take therapy session if you think it'll help.

FROM: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
TO: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
DATE: 30/06/2024

No need to worry about my time. It's my job to support people in such situations.
You did well by analyzing your condition during this state. And I also understand your feelings about working in the Foundation. Performing your duties is very important, but you also have a great responsibility, which, together with various unpleasant circumstances, can put pressure on you. Experiencing this pressure all the time might negatively affect your mental health.
It's possible that your problems appeared primarily because of overworking and excessive contact with the unpleasant atmosphere reigning in your workplace. I think the best solution now would be to temporarily step away from work. Try to postpone all matters that aren't urgent and relax a little. If need be, ask other researchers to temporarily replace you.
Taking the session was the right decision. I will wait for you the day after tomorrow in my office at 2 PM, if this time suits you. Good luck!

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 30/06/2024

Yes, it suits me. Thank you. See you soon!

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 01/07/2024

I'm sorry, but is our session being postponed? I arrived today at the appointed time, but I couldn't find you or your assistant in the office. I sat there for about an hour until I realized that you probably won't come and left.
By the way, your advice didn't help a lot. I tried to relax and stop thinking about work all day, but there was no success. To be honest, it began to happen more often. Now I can't stop visualizing this damned ruined place. Unfortunately, I'm running out of sedatives. Maybe there are some other methods to oppose this?

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 03/07/2024

Hello. Sorry to bother you again, but as I saw, my previous message remained unanswered. I went to your office again yesterday but didn't find anyone. Do you happen to know where everyone has gone?

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 07/07/2024

I went to work today, even though you said not to. Sorry. But there was no one there too. I went and searched for a long time, but couldn't find anyone. The images are getting more and more vivid, everything around looks ruined. Please respond after you'll see this message.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 10/07/2024

The images won't stop. They're all around me. I want to stop this, but I don't know how. I can't see people. Please respond.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 14/07/2024

I need your response. It's fine if you don't have time for a session right now. Just write something.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 19/07/2024

Anything.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 24/07/2024

Please.

+ ACCESS: DESKTOP #4A (Security credentials required)

- Credentials accepted. Access granted.

FROM: Junior Researcher Joseph Patterson <noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd#noitadnuof.pcs|nosrettaprd>
TO: Site Psychiatrist Helen Williams <noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh#noitadnuof.pcs|smailliwh>
DATE: 25/07/2024

Today I finally walked out of the building and looked at the world that surrounds me for real. I probably wouldn't have done it on my own, but, to be fair, it became pretty much impossible to hide in this small dirty room. Besides, I've run out of the amnestic pills that used to calm me down. Some of my colleagues could've told me where to get more, but they're not here. They're gone, just like everyone else.
Actually, I probably won't need more pills anyway. As I've discovered during the past several weeks, taking too much hurts your brain more than it helps. Couldn't stop vomiting this morning, and head still hurts like hell. But on the plus side, now I can think straight. If what I'm looking at is truly the end, at least I'll see it with a clear mind. Well, relatively clear.
It's interesting how the Site changed due to the lack of people. Now it seems so empty, so spacious. Even alien to some extent.
Thank you for your help, Helen, you always were there for me. I'm sorry that I didn't have a chance to tell you this earlier.

/SEND

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ERROR! YOUR MESSAGE CANNOT BE SENT. THE DEVICE YOU ARE USING IS NOT CONNECTED TO THE NETWORK.