close

Info

X

"Ready or Not…"
A challenger approaches.

More by this author!

2021

January
Site-79: Yumegēmu, Tokushima, Japan

The air was still, and the light was strange. It was late afternoon, but the sky was black, and the landscape was… fuzzy. Unclear. The roar of the departing helicopter was muted; he glanced up at it, and swore that in the moment before it vanished into the low cloud cover its rotors became a solid disc.
I didn't think the nexus reached as far as the Site.
Allan J. McInnis examined Site-79: a sheer rectangle, ten storeys tall, peppered with windows. The windows were dark. A single door gleamed at the end of the walkway which began at his feet, at the edge of the helipad. The gleam diffused, and he realized someone had exited the building; the gleam vanished, and he realized that someone had closed the door.
"Director McInnis?" The dim landing lamps revealed the other man as a Foundation agent. "Chief Kuroki, security." The chief was a well-built, fairly tall Japanese man with no hair and a no-nonsense expression.
They shook hands. "Pleased to meet you," said McInnis. "Where did all the light go?"
Kuroki shrugged. "Some nexuses are like bad weather, no telling what they're gonna do. You know how it is." McInnis did know, as Site-43 was itself in the middle of a nexus — an area of high sustained anomalous activity. Every one was different.
Every one was dangerous.
"It doesn't usually reach us," Kuroki continued. "But there's no predicting a genius loci." Nx-58 was unique, simultaneously video game and dream logic themed, and nobody knew why.
They headed through the gloom to the door. There was a keypad set into the brick wall; Kuroki typed in a long numeric code, and there was a click. He smiled apologetically at McInnis. "If you'll loan me the password, sir, I'll use it to set the lock."
McInnis raised an eyebrow. "I'm supposed to give the password to the double agent. Did something change while I was in transit?"
Kuroki nodded. "We're not hunting moles anymore; the mole is hunting us. I'll explain once we're inside."
McInnis was an expert at reading expressions. among other things. Kuroki looked determined, but honest. "Very well." He leaned down and whispered the password in the chief's ear.
Kuroki tapped up a storm on the keypad, and there was a low beep. He opened the door. "After you, sir." He gestured into the darkness.
It was very dark. McInnis stepped onto the limin of the sheer wall of black, and had just enough time to realize his mistake before Kuroki pushed him through and slammed the door behind him.
He took a deep, steadying breath, then exhaled. "Well," he said. "Damn." He forced himself to close his eyes. It could take up to half an hour to acquire proper low-light vision, and the sooner —
There was a flash against his eyelids, and he opened them. The space he was standing in was still an undifferentiated shade of pitch, but a series of glowing words and symbols now filled his vision. He tilted his head from side to side; the marquee was two-dimensional, like a television screen display.

"Excellent," he announced flatly. "What could be better."
He committed the unfamiliar company name to memory just in time for it to wink out of existence. He heard the wasps-against-glass tinkling of fluorescents sparking to life, and a greyish light filled what was now recognizably a waiting room: four walls lined with chairs and tables, a security checkpoint with a glass screen, a closed door with a placard reading MENU, and various pieces of furniture in a shocking state of disrepair. The chair cushions were rotted, and the tables were caked with grime. There was rust in the air, and he had to fight the urge to hold his breath.
The floor was covered in what looked like tiny leaves: brown, wrinkled, and alternately dried or moldy. They crinkled and squished beneath his shoes as he walked to the nearest doorway and peered out at the seemingly endless maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
"Hide and Seek," he muttered.
"Guess which part we play," a tired voice behind him muttered back.

"How long has this been going on?" McInnis whispered, as they crept into the barren staff room. He carefully shut the door, the one labelled MENU, behind them.
The haggard, unshaven, still bald security chief shook his head. "Days. Weeks? Don't know. Time doesn't pass when he's not around." Kuroki grabbed up a backpack from a mouldering couch.
"When who's not around?"
Kuroki withdrew a crude model of a handgun from the pack. "If you're in here, you met him already."
McInnis sighed. "He looked like you."
Kuroki nodded. "He wasn't me. I don't know who he is, but…" He gestured at the desolation around them. "This is his dream. Or his game. Or both."
"I thought the Site was a safe distance from the nexus."
Kuroki was examining the gun model carefully. "It is. Whatever's going on, it's not just Yumegēmu doing it." The town of Yumegēmu was coterminous with Nx-58, much as Sloth's Pit, Wisconsin was with Nx-18.
McInnis noticed a single newspaper article pinned to a bulletin board, and walked over to look at it. A date — 1981/05/22 — was scrawled in the margin in red pen.

Toyomachi Entrepreneur Secures
Investment Capital

Toyomachi native Shinoda Souma has always wanted to make video games, but he never had the time, the technology, or the money. After ten years of rigorous service with the Special Forces Group, however, he finally has all three.
"Opening up my own studio in my hometown is the best decision I've ever made," he beams. "I was proud to serve my country, but I'm ready to put military life behind me and do something creative. To add something to our culture, instead of just protecting it." Souma believes that video games are Japan's most important contribution to world media today, and he's got plans for his fledgling company. He's risking it all on this venture, having secured a substantial sum of investment capital from an anonymous silent partner.
"Togenkyo is my dream," he explains. "I'm going to start small, but once I've got the skills and a reputation I want to really test the boundaries of the medium. I have this idea for a role-playing ga

The words were changing even as he read them. Synonyms tagged in and out at random. The grammatical structure flexed and twisted. Before he could finish reading, the characters were all Japanese. A moment later the scrap of paper was blank.
"Bizarre," he whispered.
Kuroki walked up beside him as the paper disappeared, now wearing an expensive-looking MTF headset. "You set up for wireless?"
McInnis nodded, tapping his right ear. "High security band seven."
Kuroki turned a dial on the side of his headset, turned away, and whispered "Can you hear me?" McInnis heard it loud and clear, and whispered back "Yes."
Kuroki turned back to face him. "Not really into British ASMR, but it's better than him hearing us." Kuroki tapped the bulletin board; McInnis saw that what had once been cork was now a flat brown slab. He reached out to touch it, feeling the cold smoothness of polished stone.
"Time to get going," said Kuroki, walking into the adjoining office. McInnis followed him, noting that the door was labelled SETTINGS.
This room was sparsely furnished: a computer terminal on a dusty desk, no chair. Kuroki leaned on the desk, and McInnis noted that the dust was not disturbed by his hand. McInnis was disturbed by this. The terminal was working, however, and what it displayed was simple enough.

Kuroki looked hopeful. "Think we can shut this mess down?"
McInnis tapped the arrow keys, counting the spaces. Forty-one. Well well well. He shook his head. "It's definitely the password, but your doppelganger took it. He was obviously prepared for this."
Kuroki grimaced. "Then we've got a long trip ahead of us. I hope you're a hiker."
"I was in the swimming club at Eton. But where are we going? I can just call in on my transmitter, and get the second password."
"We're going to the comm centre," said Kuroki. "Because your transmitter won't work."
McInnis bristled. "Of course it will work. Why wouldn't it work? It was designed by my two best engineers."
"These engineers," said Kuroki. "They magic? They magic engineers?"
"No, but—"
"Won't work," Kuroki grunted. He looked down at the desk, then lifted his hand and examined it. There was no dust on his skin. He examined his gun again; it was no longer recognizable as such. It looked like two black rectangles stuck together at an angle. "We need to move. Now."

The hallway beyond the foyer was darker than it had been when he'd looked just minutes prior, and he realized he could no longer hear the hum of the lights or air cycling in the vents. Kuroki had produced a pair of flashlights, and as they made their way toward the main office block McInnis marvelled at the complete lack of particulate matter floating in the beams.
"We're moving away from him, aren't we?" he asked softly.
"Yes." Kuroki kept his eyes fixed forward. "The farther we get from him, the hazier the details become. I think he needs to concentrate on the setting, to make it real." He showed McInnis the gun; it now resembled an L-shaped Tetris block. "If this thing starts looking like it can shoot real bullets, you need to start running."
Kuroki claimed the gun contained three bullets; he also claimed to have hit their mysterious foe with the other fourteen, to little or no effect. He further claimed not to know what had happened to the rest of the Site personnel, or whether this actually was the real Site anymore, or what the purpose of the game might be. He was, however, quite well-versed in its mechanics.
McInnis peered into the murk. The beams only penetrated so far. "What's the danger in getting too far away from him? I presume that's why we're in such a hurry."
They reached a door marked, more sanely, OFFICES. Kuroki tried the handle, but there was no action at all. He leaned back, and kicked it open; a few unlikely shards of plaster fell to the floor, fell through the floor, and vanished. "Things stop working," he explained. "Lose enough detail, and doors stop being doors."
"Could that happen to us?" They flashed their lights into the cavernous space beyond.
"No." Kuroki set his mouth in a grim line. "He's not imagining us. And anyway, they'd get to you first."
"They?"
Kuroki jerked a thumb over his shoulder. McInnis shone his light back down the hall…
…illuminating, in the far distance, a spray of white pinpricks floating in the air. He was seeing reflections from a sea of eyes, eyes set into the skulls of pale white figures shuffling back and forth at the edge of the light's reach.
Dozens of them.
"Gameplay mechanism," Kuroki spat. "The edge of the functional space is full of those fuckers, and they're not friendly. Keep your enemy close, but not too close."
Once they were both in the office block, McInnis shut the door firmly. The lock clicked.

"Why do you think the comm center will be any better?" McInnis wasn't sure they should be whispering at each other, no matter how silently, but there was something oppressive about the endless expanse of flat-shaded cubicles.
"Video game logic. If you need to place a call, you need to go somewhere specifically designed for placing calls. Everything else won't work. Phone lines will be cut, cell phones will have no reception, et cetera." They passed a cubicle with a single yellow Post-it Note, blank, stuck to the side. "As long as the destination is reasonably distant —and this one is — and we encounter resistance along the way — and we probably will — success is virtually guaranteed."
Virtually. McInnis frowned. "What kind of resistance are you expecting?"
Kuroki didn't respond.
"Kuroki? What kind of resist—" He noticed the look on the chief's face, and what it was directed towards. There was a scrap of paper on the carpet in front of them; McInnis knelt down to look at it. Another newspaper article, dated in the same manner as the first: 2000/02/19.

Togenkyo:
Under New Management

The silent partner is silent no longer. After an emergency executive meeting Friday, Togenkyo chairman Shinoda Souma has been stripped of his position. He's been under fire for years due to the ballooning production costs and ultimate commercial failure of Ikigai, the role-playing game he'd dreamed of making since the company's foundation in the 1980s. That foundation was built on investment capital, and the investors have finally called in the debt. They demanded his ouster, and lacking the cash to make the problem go away, the board acceded.
While Shinoda is expected to remain as lead designer at the company he created under the new regime, an anonymous source at Togenkyo claims that the majority shareholder has "big plans" for the sleepy backwater of Toyomachi. Vast swathes of real estate have been gobbled up, and the town has been re-branded in an effort to make it a Mecca of Japanese game development. The mysterious new owners have tentatively renamed it "Yumegēmu," suggesting at a foreign connection; they might want to pick a name that actually makes sense in Japanese if they want to blend in better.

As he finished reading, he could actually see the ink shining in the flashlight beam. He noticed the fibres in the carpet for the first time, saw tiny lines of colour wind and unwind through them, and tasted a sudden burst of dust in the air. He glanced at Kuroki's belt, and saw a gleaming new Glock 17 hanging from it.
He stood up. Kuroki was looking over the edge of the nearest cubicle; it now had a desk and chair in it.
Then there was a computer on the desk.
Then there was a—
"Run," Kuroki whispered.

They flew through the solidifying offices, rust and rot shredding the desks and cubicles all around them, flakes of orange dust peppering the floor tiles, granular and crunchy underfoot, smearing into the substrata of mouldering plant matter. What is that plant matter? They heard for the first time a steady thrumming of unseen machinery in the unseen ceiling, fan blades slicing the air in invisible vents. Dustmotes danced crazily in their flashlight beams, which finally revealed a wall and a closed door ahead.
McInnis ran faster and faster, heavy footfalls behind him, Kuroki's terrified face to once side. He stole a glance back at their pursuer and saw a thin male figure wrapped in white linen, a vast pike with a nasty glinting blade over its shoulder — flakes of something soft and pink tumbled from the edge like rain — and a high-tech cyclopean visor painting them one after the other with a shaft of cold white light. He looked where they were running again, and saw the white light fall on the door. It sharpened, clarified, became more obviously real as the apparition's attention fell over it.
Kuroki struck it, McInnis threw it open, and they flung themselves into the stairwell.

They were supposed to be heading up, so by wordless agreement they headed down instead. One flight below, flashlights off, they waited breathlessly for the sound of the door reopening; in tune with the blood hammering in their ears, they heard their nemesis rushing up the stairs above them. They stood stock still in the dark, clutching the railing as their only link to the real world, while the padding footsteps faded gradually away.
They flicked their flashlights back on. Detail was already leeching out of the environment, but McInnis noticed a file folder under Kuroki's boots. There was a single sheet of paper inside, brightly coloured. The text flickered between English and Japanese, so it took McInnis a few moments to read it all.

Imperial Japanese Anomalous Matters Examination Agency

Record of Dismissal: Agent Tsunoda Yori

Tsunoda Yori, Kitsunetsuki, is found incapable of continuing to serve the Empire in his capacity as an Agent of IJAMEA. Internal assessment of Agent Tsunoda suggests that the events of Operation Shippai resulted in irreparable psychological and emotional damage. As his abilities make amnesticization impossible and neutralization undesirable, he is to be placed into a reserve capacity and allowed, under monitoring, to resume civilian life.

He handed it to Kuroki. "Kitsunetsuki?"
Kuroki glanced at the sheet, which was now entirely covered in Japanese characters, and rolled his eyes. "Folkloric term. IJAMEA uses it for some reality benders."
McInnis nodded. "They didn't know how to take it out of him, and they didn't know if they might need it some day, so they let him go. Under watch. Do you think…" He pointed up the stairs. "Do you think that's him?"
Kuroki shrugged. "Makes as much sense as anything else."
McInnis stared at the paper, begging it to explain itself. "I wonder what it means. What all these files are even doing here."
"Files…" Kuroki slapped his forehead. "Of cou—"
The sound of a door opening and closing somewhere above them cut him off, signalling the creature's exit from the stair well. It was safe to ascend again. In fact… McInnis peered at the next landing below them, and saw pale white figures detaching themselves from the pale white concrete walls. They peered back up at him with blank expectancy.
Kuroki crumpled up the now-blank sheet, and tossed it down the stairs. The figures ignored it. "Come on."
"He doesn't seem to be in a great tearing hurry," McInnis remarked as they crept steadily upward.
Kuroki's brow furrowed. "He was even slower before you came. But he doesn't need to be in a hurry, because this is his dream. And he doesn't want to be, because this is his game."
McInnis remembered telling Sokolsky that he didn't know anything about video games, and felt an unaccustomed rush of ire. "I don't suppose you know what genre this is?"
Kuroki looked thoughtful. "Until a few moments ago, I thought it was straight survival. I was hoarding food, collecting supplies, staking out places to rest and heal. It never occurred to me that I wasn't really getting hungry, or tired." He looked haunted. "In retrospect, I think it's actually survival horror."
McInnis shrugged. "What's the difference?"
Kuroki actually smiled, though his eyes were still wild and hollow. "You don't sleep, and you don't eat. You set up saferooms, manage your routes, solve puzzles… and read backstory in conveniently-placed files."
"Ah." McInnis rubbed his neck. "Do you think he knows the files are here?"
"I think they're from his subconscious. However he's doing this, it's equal parts game and dream. If we're very, very lucky, there might be something in those files we can use."
"And if there isn't?"
Kuroki looked grim again. "I don't know much about fighting games, but I don't see us giving much trouble to an ex-IJAMEA agent with a naginata."

"How much further?" McInnis asked, as they mounted yet another landing.
Kuroki glanced at a fuzzy placard on the wall. "Comm centre is top floor, so… twenty minutes."
McInnis stopped walking and pointed at the placard. "Seventh floor. There's only ten."
Kuroki nodded, gesturing up the stairs. "Yeah, but we're gonna need to take the elevator."
The word 'why' died on McInnis' lips as he shone his light up the stairs and saw that the next landing was completely blocked off by a pile of rubble and broken filing cabinets.
"Video games," said Kuroki. "The straight approach never works."
McInnis walked back to the landing, and tried the door. The handle moved, but the door wouldn't budge. "Fantastic. Did you know this was going to happen?"
Kuroki shrugged. "I had a pretty good idea."
"Will the elevator be working?"
"Almost certainly not. We'll probably have to find the electrical control centre."
"And that'll be up here somewhere?"
"No, it'll be on the first floor. Or in the basement."
This time McInnis actually reached out to grab the chief's shoulder. "Then why on Earth did we walk all the way up here?"
"Because we had to see this. Whichever route we took first was always going to be blocked; we just collapsed the waveform. If we'd tried the elevator, odds are it would've had power, but it would've also malfunctioned halfway up. I'd much rather a busted stairwell than a plummeting elevator. I'm only guessing we'll need to turn it on, but it's an educated guess. And the power room probably didn't even exist until we found this mess, since we'd have had no reason to go looking for it."
McInnis tried not to huff. "That doesn't even sound like video game logic. I've seen enough video games in the old Arcadia files to know that they at least make gestures towards logic and continuity."
Kuroki smiled thinly. "Survival horror doesn't always. Dreams don't ever."
They stood there for a moment, staring at each other. Then they headed back down the stairs.

They'd just reached the fourth floor landing when they heard it: the shrill shriek of an unlubricated hinge, from somewhere below them. Wordlessly they exited the stairwell into a hall of glassed-in offices.
They walked in silence, attempting a sort of feline tread, wincing every time their shoes squeaked on the linoleum tiles. McInnis felt his leg muscles ache with the effort to not break into a run. He noticed the deep bags beneath Kuroki's eyes, and wondered whether the man really hadn't needed sleep or whether he'd simple decided he couldn't afford it. The image of Kuroki passed out in some dark corner while the white-wrapped spectre stalked the halls for him sent involuntary shivers down McInnis' spine.
They didn't hear the whine of another door swinging open and shut, so it took them a moment to realize what was happening. The incessant buzzing of tension in McInnis' skull blended so seamlessly with the rising hum of the air conditioner that he didn't even notice the difference. The gloom seemed to deepen, and he realized far too late that it had taken on definition. The space in front of them had been flat black before, but now their flashlights cast shadows with character and dynamism. The gun on Kuroki's belt was…
…Kuroki was running, and so was he. They were operating on pure animal instinct. Though their now-heavy footfalls resounded through the hall, McInnis could distinctly hear the rustling of bandages behind them. He glanced over his shoulder, which he knew he shouldn't do; the eerie figure in white, his searching electronic eye, the petals they're petals falling from his glinting weapon.
The floor was slick, and they both nearly slipped and fell. The rotten matter that carpeted the entire Site was now alive and vibrant, the same pink blossoms their pursuer was somehow generating.
A branching path ahead: a door, and an open stairwell. McInnis headed for the latter, but Kuroki grabbed him in mid-run and steered him for the door. "Veer left," Kuroki hissed. "He'll chase me."
They burst through the door, and the chief slammed it shut hard behind them. McInnis turned left and ran pell-mell down this new, sweet-smelling office corridor. What was that smell?
The door slammed open again with a shattering BANG and CRUNCH, and McInnis chanced another look back. The door had struck the wall and bounced back, obscuring his view of both Kuroki and their opponent.
So it will chase him, because it won't even see me. Fast thinking, chief.
A wooden office door lay across the hall ahead, next to an open elevator shaft. The wood was rotten, the glass was cracked; the hinges had rusted away. He ducked into the empty doorway and skidded to a stop in the middle of the room, colliding roughly with a paper-strewn desk and knocking the contents to the floor with a soft rustling sound. The papers drifted across the office in the breeze provided by a metal desk fan, which had suddenly—
No.
The whole world sharpened, came into focus as he heard the footsteps in the hallway and the sound of metal scraping against plaster.
No no no.

The Green Machine

The Time After Time Password

...Here I Come


Pinpricks: Something very experimental. My first real attempt at stream of consciousness. Let's see how this goes.

▸ More by this Author ◂

{$comments2}

F.A.Q.

{$doesthisfixthebug}

Pinpricks of light sway in the darkness, attached to bodies of gray flesh and mold. Blue and bright, the lights stare at me from the shadows like eyes. It bounces off sloughing, wet skin and walls of black, cut stone. My skin feels loose, but firm in the spots where the light bursts through. I brush my arm and the fat and the flesh peels off, dropping on the floor with a wet thud. Gnawing and gulping follows shortly afterwards.
The pinpricks of light are on me. In me. I feel their tendrils wriggle beneath, burrowing into everything, replacing flesh and nerve where there is none. They pull at my bones and cartilage since my muscles no longer can. They flail out of the gaping hole where my eye used to be. I don't remember when I lost it. Or where. The tendrils don't hurt. Not anymore.
Not after… how long has it been? Did I get them yesterday? Or has it been longer? I think it's been much, much longer. But it could have been yesterday. It doesn't really matter. Not here in the dark.
Still, it'd be nice to know I guess. I reach out to the other pinpricks, shouting to see if they know. They don't answer. I grab one of them, I think his name is, or used to be… something with a D, and ask again. Nothing but dank air and wheezing comes out.
I remember I don't have vocal cords anymore. There's only light in my throat now. I let go off the person who's name used to be something with an A and apologise. My hand feels heavier. Few seconds later I realize that it's in my mouth, and now it feels lighter than before. This works.
I shrug and accept that I won't ever know for sure how long I've been here. There definitely was something before the pinpricks, though. I don't think I was very happy back then. I was somewhere else first. There was… a sky, and red plants. And mushrooms, kind of like the pinpricks and their tendrils, but not as fun.
I remember being angry at… someone. Seems quite pointless now, but back then I was furious, and so were others. We did something that others didn't like. There was blood and steel and fire, and I burned. I was even less happy afterwards. I was forced to move, or someone moved me, and then there was mist and huge shadows of stone.
And shapes in the fog.
I was scared of them then, but now there's a connection of some sort. Has been ever since the big men of steel ran from them and the pinpricks. I… screamed when they slithered in my mouth and my eyes and nostrils and ears and through my skin and my bones, and then I died. Or was I born? Maybe both. I don't know why I'd fear such a wonderful thing, honestly.
The shapes whisper to the pinpricks sometimes. I think they made them.
And I love them for it.
There's images, too, sometimes. The shapes show me what they see. There's people and lights. But they're warm, not like the pinpricks. The shapes don't like them, so I don't either. I don't really know why to be honest. Sometimes I feel like I don't have a choice.
I can feel them now. Walking and breathing and talking and living above us. Most of them don't know we're here. But that's fine, they will soon.
They too will know the pinpricks.


Vivarium

Hey there! You should read some of the other stuff I made… or not!
I'm not the boss of you, do whatever you want!
More by Vivarium

The back door of the club stands in front of you. Your gun hangs in your jacket pocket, and a satchel containing all the money you could find wraps around your fingers.
The two men guarding the backdoor eye you up.
"Look at this. Our lap dog has returned. You want to be let back in?"
You bite your tongue and nod as they let you in. You pass by rooms filled with people plugged into servers with screens above each of their heads. The monitors show a virtual club filled with people dancing, ignoring the fact they are slaves to the lights and sounds.
Paintings framed extravagantly hang on every wall.
They all portray one man.
Momo Tsuyaki.
You pass by an open door. In the side of your vision you can barely see guards sorting and packaging cocaine and opium into bags. All of them have been augmented to some capacity with cybernetics. Their eyes follow you as you pass by.
Eventually you are standing in front of an open door frame. You see a room filled with ornate furniture, and exotic trinkets.
Momo Tsuyaki looks up from his desk at the end of the room and meets your eyes. For an ever stretching moment, you two share each other's gaze. Then he points at you.
The guards by his side begin to walk towards you.
"Do you have the money?" He says to you.
"Yes." You walk through the room and hand the satchel to one of the guards as he moves past.
You hear the sound of their footsteps cease. They are standing in front of the only exit. You see a gun on Tsuyaki's desk. It is trimmed with gold and silver. Leather wrapped around its porcelain grip.
What an asshole.
"Thank you for coming back to me, Roach." Tsuyaki leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette. He blows smoke into your face as he continues to talk. "So tell me, how did you get this money?"
"It's every cent I have." you say.
"Really? Not many people who come to me have 10,000,000 yen. It's even stranger that someone like you does." Tsuyaki leans forward. "So tell me. Did you steal this money?"
"No." You lie.
Tsuyaki leans forward. His eyes are empty voids that show no hint of thought or emotion. "Then why do you want me to smuggle you off the island?"
You remain silent. Thinking of what to say. Before you can open your mouth, Tsuyaki speaks.
"There are a lot of reasons someone would want me to this do this for them. To hide from the loan sharks. To escape men with guns who want to put a bullet in your skull. To start over with a new leaf. Tell me, why do you want to run away?" Tsuyaki's eyes burn through you with their gaze.
"There are things I want to put behind me."
Tsuyaki takes a long drag on his cigarette. "How very vague of you. I think you are running from one of the big fish. So tell me, is it the Foundation? The GOC?" Tsuyaki stands from his chair, and is soon standing right in front of you. "Or are you running from MC&D?"
"I'm not running from anything. I just want to start over."
Tsuyaki's eyes dart behind you for a brief moment. "I'm surprised, I thought you would be a better liar." You feel two sets of hands grab you by the shoulders and force you to the ground.
"The fuck Tsuyaki, I gave you what you wanted!" You struggle against the two men restraining you, but can't break free. Your knees dig into the carpet.
"I don't want your money. The Yamagachi-gumi have made a deal with MC&D. I want something else from you." Tsuyaki takes another long drag on his cigarette, grabs the gun from his desk, and presses the end against your temple. "I want to put this bullet in your skull."
He pulls the trigger.

✖

…

-Internal structure compromised-

…

-Neural stability is at 86%-

…

-Temporal relocation ready-

…

Try Again?

_

⟲⟳

Your head throbs as your vision returns. The easy option was never an option.
You find yourself in front of an open door frame. The pain behind your eyes subsides.
You see a room filled with ornate furniture, and exotic trinkets. Tsuyaki looks up from his desk at the end of the room.
You think of the many different ways you can smash his face into the ground.
"Do you have the money?" He says to you.
You stay in the door frame. "I do."
The two guards begin to walk towards you.
You wait for a perfect moment. Tsuyaki lights a cigarette.
The two guards are almost at the door frame. You lift the satchel in your left hand and bring it down on the guard on the left's head. You simultaneously remove your gun, and shoot the guard on the right in the chest three times. Blood covers the wall.
Tsuyaki frantically draws his gun. You grab the dazed left guard, and position him in between Tsuyaki, and yourself. Bullets fill the guards body as you push forward. A couple bullets dig themselves into you.
When you hear Tsuyaki reloading, you let the body fall to the ground, and lunge at Tsuyaki. The two of you struggle on the ground, until you have the back of Tsuyaki's head, in the palm of your hand. You shove it against the floor, and shove the end of your gun to his right temple.
"Is there even a fucking boat, Tsuyaki, or were you just going to kill me?!"
"You are going to die." He spits blood onto the carpet.
You fire your gun next to his head, shooting the wall next to him. He groans from the ringing in his ears.
"I'm not here to play your stupid little games! Is there a fucking boat Tsuyaki?!"
"… No." Tsuyaki struggles to laugh through the pain. You bite down on your rage.
You pull the trigger, and his limp body falls to the ground. You look to the door frame and see three more guards with cybernetics approaching the door. You duck behind the desk as the bullets fly above your head. Blood is slowly making its way out of you as you slowly bleed out.
Splinters of wood pierce your skin as you are riddled with more bullets.
You are cornered, and there are more bullets in you than in your gun.
There is no chance you will escape this time.
A bullet lodges itself in the back of your head.

✖

…

-Internal structure compromised-

…

-Neural stability is at 71%-

…

-Temporal relocation ready-

…

Try Again?

_

⟲⟳

The pain in your head is a rusty nail resting in the front of your skull.
Tsuyaki lights a cigarette.
You will kill him as many times as you need to.
The two guards are almost at the door frame. You don't say a word as they walk up to you. You lift the satchel into the air, and bring it down on the left guards head. You remove your gun, and shoot the guard on the right in the head. You saved two bullets. Viscera covers the wall.
Tsuyaki draws his gun, but before he can shoot you, you fire a bullet into his arm, causing him to drop his gun.
You grab the dazed guard and use him as a shield. When the three guards rush around the corner, you empty your magazine. One goes down, as the others duck behind cover, and return fire.
You let go of the dead body, find cover, and reload your gun. You finish putting the bullets in your gun just in time to fire a shot into the neck of the guard running through the door frame. The third guard moves quickly and decks you in the nose. The gun falls from your hand.
Tears well in your eyes due to your broken nose. The guard attempts to aim his gun, but you are able to knock it out of his hands and land a haymaker to the side of his head. You clench both hands onto his neck and begin crushing his wind pipe. The guard makes futile attempts to pummel you, but his body soon goes limp just like the others.
The room is quiet. You pick up your gun and walk over to Tsuyaki, who is currently holding his wounded arm. You don't develop pain tolerance behind a desk.
"I read your file… they will get you eventually… MC&D doesn't leave loose ends." He says as you hold the gun to his head. "You will die like a fucking cockroach, you piece of sh-"
You pull the trigger. The room is quiet… you collect your satchel and begin to run to the exit. The moment you see the exit door open, you realize you forgot about the guards outside.
You duck into one of the server rooms before they see you. The faint sound of house music can be heard emanating from the monitors. You slow your breathing next to a comatose woman.
The sound of the guards footsteps are getting louder. You adjust your grip on your gun as you aim it at the doorway.
You see one of them.
You fire.
The second hesitates long enough for you to ram him into the wall. One good punch to the side of his head puts him on the ground quickly.
You don't waste any time running out of the building. Your car is parked a block away. Right before you open the driver side door you notice your tires. They have been slashed.
"God fucking dammit!" You slam your fist against the roof of your car, and then quickly grab what you can.
You notice the shine of headlights on your car. You turn your head just in time to see the SUV with tinted windows.
It is heading right for you.
They had a backup plan.
You didn't.
The left side of your car caves in, crushing you.

✖

…

-Internal structure compromised-

…

-Neural stability is at 53%-

…

-Temporal relocation ready-

…

Try Again?

_

⟲⟳

The pain in your head has become intense. The vision in your peripherals is blurry. Your mind is a scattered mess of glass. You bite down on your rage.
Your car is parked a block away. You run away from it, turn down an alleyway, and hide. Vomit forces its way out of you… the pain in your head subsides.
You have to get out of here, but there is no where to run. You can't go to your car. Then you notice the motorcycle parked at the end of the ally.
You take a moment to collect yourself then you run for the bike and check for the keys. Euphoria fills you when you find them. You sit down, turn the key, and drive as fast you can out of the ally. A man, who is probably the owner of the bike you're stealing, yells at you as you turn onto the street.
You drive recklessly and fast. The hotel you call home isn't too far away. Its probably not safe, but you have to get there quickly. You turn left at a red light and almost kiss the road.
The first thing you notice when you arrive is the main door wide open. You drop the bike and rush through the door.
They came here first.
You climb the stairs.
Thoughts rush through your head of what they could have done.
What they could have done to her.
You see the door to your room broken off its hinges.
You run to the door frame.
You look into the room and see three corpses dressed in purple and black suits. One has had the top half completely atomized. The second is impaled with spikes extruding from the wall. The third is completely made of stone.
In the corner of the room you see her. She is sobbing with her head in her lap.
"Yuki!" You run up to her.
She looks up at you and immediately hugs you. "Genji, They came and I lost control of it. I was scared. I'm sorry."
"It's okay. It's okay. We have to get out of here quickly." You kneel down and look her in the eyes. "You need to be strong for a little while longer… Okay?"
"…Okay."
You quickly grab what you can. Then you grab her hand, and the two of you run away from the hotel.
You won't let anyone get her.
You will not stop trying.

…

-Internal structure sustained-

…

-Temporal consistency achieved-

…

-Thank you for using Prometheus Lab's Temporal Protection Implant-

…

-New debt total is now being calculated-

…

-ERROR_NEURAL_TRANSMITTER_DAMAGED-

…

-Unable to connect to MC&D servers-

…

-Please report to the nearest Cybernetic Clinic for repairs-

…


Canon Hub » From 120's Archives Hub » The Furmen
Groups of Interest » Parawatch Hub » The Furmen

close

Info

X

More by this author

Image Sources:

Name of the file: fog1.jpg
Source: link
License: CC BY 3.0

Name of the file: fog2.jpg
Source: link
License: CC BY 3.0

Name of the file: tomb.jpg
Source: link
License: CC BY 3.0

Name of the file: graves.jpg
Source: link
License: CC BY 3.0

Name of the file: people2.png
Source: The SCPD Discord Server
License: CC BY SA 3.0
Notes: Images used with direct permission from the user and edited by JakdragonX

Name of the file: pizza.png
Source: link
License: CC BY SA 3.0

the_stoned_rallier 02/02/2021 (Tue) 17:23:12 #48195429

So I feel like I should start this off by saying I've been meaning to write this for a while now. I've been a lurker for months and I don't think that my story is worth sharing but I feel like I have to talk about this with someone.
To give you some context — I live in a small Polish village located in god-knows-where. It's your standard shit location with a swamp in place of roads and other awful terrain modifications throughout (I'll attach a picture of what the surrounding of my home looks like). It never bothered me — if you live here your entire life for generations it stops being a problem. It's a sort of "live here die here" situation, really. Naturally, when I turned 18 I had to find a job due to the beautiful situation we live in, so I started doing the only thing I was good at — fucking around with cables.
You see, we only have one power line here, meaning that if it goes dark, it all goes dark. There were situations in the past where we lost light for literal weeks due to lightning destroying one pillar or another, so naturally someone has to keep it in a good state at all times. As the "little mechanic" of the family I volunteered to inherit this title. We haven't had a person to watch over the lines for a solid month now — the previous one touched an open wire, resulting from the constant rain we have here, and fell down the entire pillar. They took him to the hospital and that's the last I saw of him — I've never been told what happened.
Anyways, I've been doing this every day for almost a year now — get up the tower, check if everything's fine, get down the tower, repeat for every single one of them, report it to the asshole supervisor in another town, — the same routine for years. But what's truly great about it is that up there, you can see so, so much. Every time I get up one of them I can feel the breeze in the air and actually see more than 4 meters in front of me due to the everpresent fog, and so I do it — the part of the routine I didn't mention was looking over the horizon, hoping to see something new among the half-dead trees.

And oh how I regret wanting that.
You see, the day is as any other — I wake up to bad weather, get something to eat, get to the towers. But this time… there was something different. First of all, I noticed that almost all of my bread is gone (I know how dumb this sounds but trust me, if the closest bakery was an hour worth of time from you, you'd know how terrifying it is to see your main food supply gone), which I blamed on me being drunk and doing some dumb shit with it. Admittedly, I did drink a little too much the day before, but I've never gone as far as to literally rid myself of essential supplies. When I got to my first tower however is when stuff started getting really weird. The ladder was opened. For those that don't know, whenever you get down again you're always supposed to close the ladder so that "something doesn't happen to it" — it's one of these things you start to do mechanically after a while that was created so children wouldn't climb it or something similar. Yet, here it was, opened like nothing happened. I was confused, be it a little unsettled, but I blamed it on some random kid wanting to climb the thing. It happens from time to time — not even the stories of literal experts dying there would help it. As normal, I climbed the ladder, trying to do my job, and the moment I looked around myself is when I noticed it.
In the corner of my eye, I noticed a small, black shape, slowly moving towards the treeline. It moved slowly but surely, like it was trying to make sure no one was looking at it. Like it knew someone might be watching.
I know some people would (and did) say that it most likely was just a human. But I'm somehow sure it wasn't. Whatever that was, it was much well, bigger than anyone else I've known, and it was almost pitch black in appearance. The second I looked at it frontally, it disappeared.
Initially, I dismissed it as me still being drunk, but when a breathalyzer (almost everyone has one in Poland) test showed that I had no alcohol in my body, I was sure it's not it. Of course no one believed me — my sister told me I'm insane and that I should be sent to an asylum and my father didn't even want to listen to me. If only my mother was still able to talk, I'm sure she would have believed me.
But that's beside the point. It's been a couple of days since that happened, but I really can't get whatever I met out of my head. It always somehow manages to creep into my mind whenever I think of anything. I… I don't know what to do anymore.
I… I know this probably sounds like I'm going insane, but I'm really unsettled. I… I'll try to do some more research on it, but I really have no idea what's going on. If anyone has any knowledge that can help me out here, please share it with me.

the_stoned_rallier 02/04/2021 (Thur) 12:29:09 #62952093

I'm losing my mind.
I've tried to stop thinking about the whole situation and just… leave it be like nothing happened, but I can't. No matter how hard I try there's always something that accidentally reminds me of what happened. I… I didn't go to work for four days straight, but that didn't help. I can't stop thinking about this.
I've looked through every single book we have here trying to find something on what that might be. I've obviously heard all of the old stories about gargoyles and whatnot, but I always dismissed it as nonsense, even now.
Until today.
Looking back through my childhood stuff I accidentally found an old fairytale book of mine. Here in Poland, we have a lot of really disturbing stories — weird, weird stuff you forget the moment you close the book. But there's always been a sore thumb in that — the story of the Furmen. Basically, it's a story of how two children wander into the woods to find the magical refugee city of the mystical Furmen and are never seen again. That's it. No moral, no anything — just this. It always seemed weird to me — all other stories had some sort of a conclusion or weird twist, but this one… never had one. As kids we quickly forgot about it, but now that I remembered it, I had to give it another look. I just couldn't stop myself.
But this time was different. The story wasn't just weird; it was… unsettling, almost. I noticed the story went into excruciating detail about how the creatures looked despite making only one real appearance, almost ignoring everything else. You miss this stuff as a kid, but I noticed that there were no descriptions of the kids. Only the Furmen and their forest lairs, looking at them with their giant eyes. But even today, there was no answer as to what happened to them.
But what unsettled me the most is what the description was showing them to be. They are supposedly 3 meters tall and have black hair. It fits perfectly. Even their sketch in the book looks the same.
I think I'm going insane. I mean, fuck, I'm believing a fairy tale literally describing mystical creatures. I know this is utterly insane, but… it perfectly fits.
I need an answer. Any answer. I'll do anything to find it.

the_stoned_rallier 02/05/2021 (Fri) 21:13:54 #92561109

I'm not going insane and I have proof of it.

Can you see this? If you zoom in well enough you'll see that someone is sitting there. Someone with black fur and 3 meters tall. It literally fits perfectly. There is no way it is anyone else. Hell, I'm the tallest in the village and I'm 1.7 meters tall.
I took the photo when I went out with my dog; I thought that his smell would find something. You know, you always see on TV how dogs help out in these cases or whatever — I know my thought process is idiotic, but it was the best I could do.
When my dog started barking like he's gone insane is when I took it. It was just sitting there, looking at me. Nothing more. Not a single move. When I blinked, it was gone in the fog. Just like that. I tried looking around where it sat, but there was nothing. My dog was beyond confused, like it felt a smell or something it had no idea what it was. And that's what worries me the most. My dog's family has been with us for literal generations; they know these swamps better than us. And he doesn't recognize the smell. Like, yeah, we have had dogs disappear in the past, but, we literally live in a swamp. They sometimes get lost when they run away. Sure, we always do a search, but we thought it was natural. We've had it happen to people in the past, but it was always just thought to be them getting stuck in a swamp… but I don't know anymore.
I don't know what to do anymore and if I'm just simply not going insane and seeing patterns where there are none. I know that happens; hell, I've been reading these forums for a while now, and I know that reading this stuff makes you do that, but this can't just be my imagination, right?
I got it. I… please, if anyone has any knowledge of what they are and what they want, help me out. I need any information I can gather. I… my sister and father are going away this week to the city and I can't just tell her I want them to stay because I'm chased by a goddamn monster. I need to know what to do. Please, please, please help me out here. I need to find any information on them. I need to know how to protect myself. It never happens in these posts and I need to know that. Please, please help me.

the_stoned_rallier 02/06/2021 (Sat) 01:12:32 #08866281

Please, help me.
I saw something again. It… it looked at me. From the woods, it looked at me directly through my window. I don't leave the house anymore. I feel like I'm being constantly watched. I haven't shown up to work in ages now, but for some reason no one cares. I can't talk to anyone except you because only you will ever possibly believe me. Fairytales are known to inspire creativity in children and I've always been a not so mature person and I know that if I tell this to anyone I will come off as insane and no one will believe me. Please, help me. I barricaded my front door and let my dog inside so that I have a single companion. He's the only one I can trust — he saw what I saw and knows something is wrong. I don't know what to do anymore. Please, I need anything.

the_stoned_rallier 02/07/2021 (Sun) 19:52:90 #92701183

I saw footsteps outside my home today. At first I thought it was just a bear and I'm exaggerating stuff, but they were way too big to be a bear's. They are absolutely giant. But the worst part of them is that they were shallow. Which means that whatever made them didn't sink into the mud.
I need to do something. I can't call the police — the nearest police station is literally 23 kilometers of swamp from me. But even if they came, what do you think I would tell them? That I'm being stalked by monsters?
I need to do something. I need to find where they come from and what they want. I need to do something. Please, you people know this stuff. I need help now.

the_stoned_rallier 02/08/2021 (Mon) 16:57:12 #62952093

In my panic I've read literally every single thread concerning anything similar on this goddamn idiotic website. Every single one of them, each one more stupid than the last one. Nothing. Not a single one similar.
So I went on similar websites, like Reddit out of all places. I found that someone had an encounter with a ghost and then released themselves by helping it out. now I know it was stupid but I thought that if I do the same it would work too, because that's the only way I thought would ever work. And so I did.
In a state of prime desperation, I took my grandpa's old war backpack and a flashlight… I hoped to follow back the footsteps to whatever made them and… confront it or help it in some way or something. I know it's dumb as hell, but it's the best I could do then. I should have so stayed inside.
I got my best shoes and got out into the forest, frantically checking every corner of my eye. I literally cried out of pure stress. Every minute of me walking down these foggy bogs felt like a literal hour of a chore through literal oil. I was so scared. I don't know how, but I made it safely into the treeline. Even though I knew that's where whatever stalked me lived, I felt much safer there. Like I could mask from them now. Like… like I wasn't just a hunted animal anymore but an equal rival.

That's when I found it. After what felt like literal billions of years of navigating through a dimly lit half-dead bog filled with fog, I found an opening. I don't know how, but… light felt different in that place. There was no fog and the sky was clear. But oh my god how I regret initially being happy upon my discovery.
I found a graveyard. A graveyard no one has ever known about. It's not on any map, not anything; not a single story from my childhood describes it. And trust me, in my 21 years here I thought I've heard everything.
The graves in it were… nonhuman. There was no reason to their location or their shapes. The descriptions of who laid there were literally unreadable. It's hard to describe it well, but the whole thing didn't feel like it was made by us. But the worst part of it was that there were fresh footsteps.
I tried digging it up to see if it wasn't just me being insane and if I haven't stumbled into some forgotten soldiers burial ground from the Wars, but oh god how I wish it was.
In these graves, there was something I couldn't describe. Like it wasn't human. Long, grey bones filled with leaf-like decorations I never saw in my life. Items that looked like toys made out of wood. I don't think I've ever been that scared. Hell, I literally cried when a bird started singing near me.
I initially thought that getting out there was a good idea but I realized it was the stupidest one of my life. I didn't want anything more than to get back home and call someone, hell anyone. I literally sprinted like I never did before.
But it got worse.
I tried running back home as fast as I could, sprinting the best I could, not feeling any tiredness or exhaustion. Adrenaline pumped through my veins like through an engine.
And that's when I fell down a loose opening beneath the ground. I fell down what I think was 2 meters. It's a miracle I didn't die on some random goddamn spike knowing my stupid luck, but I somehow survived. It was… a tomb. A tomb that someone lived in. I know how fucking stupid that sounds, but… there was no dust in it. Like someone kept the place clean.
I tried finding a way out, only to find weird items, such as wooden idols and totems, spears, and things… things made from plants I couldn't explain. I tried taking a photo of them, but whenever I did it just didn't show up in photos. I thought I was going insane, but I could literally touch it. I wandered through halls that looked like storage rooms and places that felt like lair-like caves of something.
I wanted to leave so badly. Just as my flashlight was about to die, I found a way out — a staircase leading outside.

And that's when I saw it.
A pair of yellow, glowing eyes, looking directly into my soul from my left.
I ran away as quickly as I could. I literally left everything else behind and ran, even faster than before, even faster than I thought anyone could run.
It felt like literally centuries, but I somehow made it. I've locked myself in the supply room with a shotgun and some water and a phone. I can hear them walking around my house. I can hear banging on my doors. Please send help. I don't know where my dog is. I don't know where anyone is. I'm all alone here. I have literally one dot of internet and I can barely load up this stupid website to beg for help. Even if I call the police now, they won't do anything. They won't arrive in time. I've lost all phone contact with my sister, I don't know what do to anymore. I have lost all chances. Please. I don't know what to do. Please help me. Please, please help me.

the_stoned_rallier 02/08/2021 (Mon) 18:23:43 #01632054

+ Attachment: IMG_22748598_18092561

- hide attachment

ple

No uncollapsed big images on the forums, please. — 🗿 Sin

PestilencePissJPiss 02/20/2021 (Sat) 03:02:18 #82817234

does anyone know what happened to the guy? he hasn't posted anything since that post, and i'd really love to read some more of what happened, it was really interesting. like, two weeks is a long time to wait for a conclusion

🗿 Sharpie 02/20/2021 (Sat) 03:23:56 #54271438

Checking from their profile, it looks like they weren't active ever since they posted that final post. I'm sure it's nothing serious — from what they told in chat I believe it's around the time of the year they go to the town for some supplies; I imagine they don't have access to the computer, and even if they do, posting here probably isn't a priority. Don't worry, I'm sure it's all well and good.

🤖 Parawatch_Sponsored_Content 02/20/2021 (Sat) 03:25:10 #51276543

SPONSORED CONTENT

[THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE IS A RESULT OF A BOT DISPLAYING SPONSORED CONTENT FROM PARAWATCH.NET PARTNERS. IF THERE IS ANY PROBLEM WITH THE AD, PLEASE NOTIFY PARAWATCH.NET STAFF DIRECTLY THROUGH THE OFFICIAL STAFF CHAT]

NonexistentHarold 02/22/2021 (Mon) 21:17:26 #38648736

Hey guys, you think you could remove this ad from the thread? It's blocking almost the entire screen for me and I can't read anything. Thanks.

🗿 Lovecraftian_Pedagog 02/22/2021 (Mon) 21:45:47 #78542897

The tech team are currently working on it; thanks for notifying us. We're having minor problems editing the page, but all should be back to normal in an hour or so.

[THREAD LOCKED]


CONTENT WARNING
This thread contains mentions of the following:
- suicide
Please continue at your own risk.

Rook ♖ #00000001

This thread is mandatory reading to all new members. Please read it in its entirety, as we will not tolerate ignorance as an excuse. Plus the Site Passcode is in there somewhere, so make sure you pay attention.
i: Preamble
Let's address the elephant in the room.
"Where's the wiki?"
To make a long story short: Our previous server provider severed ties with us because they ran out of money, and I was just barely able to make an offline backup of all the data before they cut the power. I don't want us to have to rely on either MediaWiki or-god forbid-Fandom as a new home. So, as of writing, we're currently migrating all our pages over to our new website. Until this mess is settled, all of our articles can be accessed via a read-only archive here.
ii: Introduction
Welcome to the Parawatch Wiki!
All works posted on this wiki, unless otherwise stated, are real events that one or more of us have experienced or believe in. This is not a roleplay site. This is not a creepypasta site.
Now, let's start from the beginning.
iii: What Is Parawatch?
Parawatch is a collaborative research/writing project aiming to document our experiences with the paranormal. This includes cryptid sightings, unusual events, conspiracy theories, and any circumstance that you can't explain using modern science. In short, we watch for the paranormal, hence the name 'Parawatch'.
Keep in mind that even though we are a writing site, we are not a creepypasta site. Please refrain from sharing creepypastas here, no matter the level of quality. This site is for real experiences and conspiracies only. In addition, please do not come in spouting ridiculous conspiracy theories such as saying that 9/11 was an inside job or that your antisemitic interpretation of Jews run the world. You will be laughed at and promptly banned.
iv: A History
Parawatch's beginnings and the story of my father are intertwined.
His job required a lot of travel. I don't know exactly what he sold, but I know he was some sort of salesman, and he would spend long periods of time on the road. During pit stops in local diners and gas stations, he would listen in on the local's conversations and whispers. All of the gossip, rumors, and folklore that he picked up, he'd write down in a journal he always kept tucked in his breast pocket.
In life, my dad was very dedicated to finding the truth; whatever that meant to him. He was a member of MUFON (much to my mother's chagrin) and always attended their big yearly conventions. During our camping trips out in the Oregonian wilderness, he would teach me how to track bigfoot and scavenge supplies in case of a societal collapse. Some might call this child abuse, but I wouldn't think so. Those memories are as dear to me as the site itself, which all began because of my father's journal.
I wouldn't find out about this journal until his passing in mid-2007. After he died, my mom and I were going through his old stuff to decide what to keep and what to throw out. It was then that I grabbed his coat and felt a little weight on it. My mother insisted I throw out the journal, but I was fascinated by the anecdotes within. Three-hundred pages of handwritten notes on small-town folklore, cryptid sightings, and conspiracies.

A page of my father's Journal.

I spent weeks poring over the journal and its contents. Though he was a salesman, my father was one hell of an author too. He effortlessly balanced what he heard and spun a narrative from it as well. I was sitting on a goldmine of creepy stories and close encounters with the paranormal. It was then that I decided to share my father's stories with the internet. I did the only thing I could think of, and went on /x/, a board I frequented in my earlier days, and typed up one of my father's stories.
The response to the story was explosive. Requests for more (Or 'moar' as they would say in those days.) spammed the replies on the thread. Other threads with a similar style as my own started popping up all over the board. It seemed as if everyone wanted to share their experiences with the paranormal. Some memorable threads include Abwesenheit and Tower-B. Those were classics.
In January 2008, someone had the bright idea of creating a wiki to catalog all these stories, and they started one up on the wiki farm 'EditThis'. Things were messy there; anyone could join up and upload their experience with the paranormal, meaning that there was suddenly a bunch of low-quality entries on the 'official' site for Parawatch. To make matters worse, EditThis was floundering financially, meaning storage on the site was low and the site runners demanded more money for hosting, which we couldn't do. Most of us were just broke college students, after all. It was then that I stumbled upon Wikidot.
Wikidot seemed like the answer to all of our problems. It allowed for much more storage space, and it was cheaper to upgrade if we felt the need to as well. The ads also weren't too invasive, so that was definitely an upgrade over EditThis too. It seemed like a no-brainer to move over to Wikidot. So we did. I gathered together some of the most well-known users on EditThis and started the migration process.
It was slow-going at first, as we brought over the classics that everyone knew and set up some staff pages for the new site. We hit snags a few times, however. There was a very popular article about how Al Gore was an alien puppet and how the 2000 election results in Florida had been rigged by a mysterious third party in Florida. It was highly controversial because it seemed like an obvious trolling attempt, but it cannot be understated how popular it was. We eventually made the decision to not bring that article over, and many folks were mad at us for it for a long time. In our leave, we also left behind a few 'joke' entries about pop-culture simply because they didn't fit the site's serious nature.
Our first few years on Wikidot were good. We grew exponentially as a site, and the new forums were a boon to our communications. Site navigation was improved by users such as 🗿 pandapandapanda and two-egg, and 🗿 bones set up the original IRC room, #parawatch. Our community was growing and improving, but with all the good came some bad.
The internet is home to various numbers of trolls, but some have become infamous in our community. The most active trolls at the time were the 'michael the kiler' troll who signed up with multiple accounts and spam-posted low-quality creepypasta, the 'Al Gore is an alien puppet' troll who demanded justice for the forgotten Al Gore Parawatch article, and consuelo who infamously spammed IRC with his own name.

MrBeeks' obituary photo.

At some point in 2010, a TVTropes page was made for Parawatch, which attracted many new members, many of which were unfortunately under the impression we were a site for creepypasta. This resulted in the creation of multiple low-quality articles, which became more and more annoying for staff to deal with as they were reposted with fervor by unknowing newbies. This eventually lead to the need for a bigger staff, and thus the admin and moderation team grew from 4 people to 7.
Years passed without much incident, until 2013, when a major contributor by the name of MrBeeks appeared on local television as a witness to a paranormal event. Needless to say, he was very excited and shared the youtube clip of himself on the forums. This was met with a mild reception, but a group of trolls decided to troll MrBeeks for his overeager behavior in the video and his unusual appearance. Various troll accounts popped up to comment on the video in the forums, and reports were made that some of them were even calling his home phone and school. MrBeeks deleted his account within a week of posting the video, and all of the troll accounts were banned.
This next sentence is The Pаaassssccoodde, to join the site: type in the following phrase in your app on the Join Page. I will treat Parawatch community members with respect, and follow the site/forum rules and required reading.
Weeks passed and everything seemed okay, sans the departure of MrBeeks. About a month after he deleted his account, another Parawatch member discovered a newspaper obituary for someone matching MrBeek's description who also attended the same university. This marked the first time one of our members was unfortunately taken from us early. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last.
The cracks finally started to show on Wikidot in mid-2015 when a Parawatch report about a cryptid in Canada by MercierMan was randomly deleted by the company for no reason. No matter how hard we pressed, we didn't get a reason for this. No matter how hard we tried, it would always be erased after the fact. As you could probably tell, this infuriated members of the community and staff alike, and finally ignited our desire to get off of the platform as a whole. This was the beginning of Project Parawatch.
Building a new wiki-style website was not easy, especially when we wanted to make sure not to replicate the many bugs and issues Wikidot has. We were fortunate to get new staff members like 🗿mallardduck and 🗿stormbreath who were technical wizards and very useful to the future of Project Parawatch, but was still a few years off.

Screenshot of a typical Wikidot error.

Wikidot continued to falter as time went on, with more and more errors appearing every day. A couple of pages disappeared here and there, and they wouldn't be allowed to be reposted, for example, a very popular one about Tom Hanks and Forrest Gump. Neither of our tech gurus could figure out what was wrong with the erased pages. They weren't breaking the Wikidot TOS nor were they technically broken, so we just collectively shrugged and blamed the crumbling infrastructure on the site we were hosted on. A popular recurring meme at the time was 'Fuck Frąckowiak', the CEO of Wikidot.
Around 2017, something changed with the way Wikidot handled ads. They became a little more intrusive and a lot less subtle. They also started advertising a place called 'Spicy Crust Pizzeria' that none of us had ever heard of. Members of the site assumed it must be a Polish thing, as Wikidot is hosted in Poland. Memes about the overabounding presence of Spicy Crust Pizzeria abounded for a while, as did the frequency of Wikidot errors.
This brings us to today, 2018! As you read upthread, this was the year where Wikidot finally went under and we had barely 24 hours notice to scrape all the content on the site before being forced out. Don't trust corporations, especially ones that seem to sit on their laurels and do squat for years. What a wild and crazy ride it's been, but we're finally in a comfortable spot. We finally have our website with Project Parawatch bearing fruit.
vi: Expected Code of Conduct
The single most important rule to follow on the Parawatch wiki is as follows:
Don't be a dick.
It's really that simple. We do, of course, have other rules, which largely stem from this one golden rule. They are as follows:

You may dispute the actions and opinions of anyone, including staff, as long as you do it in a calm, mature, and civil way.
You can comment anywhere on the site, as long as you are respectful to other users. All comments must follow the Criticism Policy. Do not troll or make personal attacks.
Don't make contentless or excessively short posts (spam), don't bump threads for attention, and don't post on threads more than a few months old if you're not contributing substantially to the conversation. Avoid double posting. Edit your previous posts using the "edit" function under the "options" tab to the lower right of every comment. Every image posted to forum or discussion threads must be collapsed.
Do not post a large number of low-quality articles. When staff tell you to slow down or stop posting, listen.

A NOTE ON PLAGIARISM- You may not copy any portion of someone else's writing to use as your own work without proper attribution. You are allowed to cite sources such as MUFON, The Weekly Exposé, or bigfootforums.com, but do not outright copy whole articles from them.
A NOTE ON SOURCES- As previously mentioned, you're welcome to use appropriate sources for your Parawatch entries, but the moment you start using places like Infowars or Breitbart to support an already shaky theory you will be laughed at and your post will be removed.

vii: Meet the Staff
Administrators
Rook ♖: # The main force behind Parawatch since its inception in 2007. Likes conspiracy theories, the occult, and everything in between. An avid listener of The Last Podcast on the Left and a connoisseur of craft beers.
VolticNatalieW ♖ : ALL GODS BLEED. Experimental artist & trash siphonophore She/xer/its/mx. Writes Lucky Star fanfiction in xer spare time.
imbroglio ♖: A regular person who totally does not live in an abandoned factory complex. Horror aficionado. Likes to write.
Moderators
🗿 bones: (As 🗿 bones refused to comment, this section was written by VolticNatalieW ♖) Ever-present chat admin and forum moderator. Seriously, day or night, it is there. It's uncanny, it's almost like a machine. Why so serious?
🗿mallardduck: Tech Co-Captain, investigative journalist, programmer, and Project Parawatch dev. Ask me about Wikidot errors.
🗿 mr_sen: Local hentai addict and bigfoot stan. Sweats caffeine. No, seriously. Patrols the forums like he patrols the fridge for snacks.
🗿 pandapandapanda: Hi! You can call me panda3 or just panda. :3 I like cute things and historical conspiracies. Curates the JFK conspiracy megathread. My favorite theory is the multiple assassins theory.
🗿stormbreath: spends way too much time on this site. expert on heaven's gate lore, has written the most articles about marshall applewhite (a whopping one). css hack. lover of greek mythology. also is tech co-captain, but who cares about that?
🗿theonewhoknocks: Handles site disciplinary matters and offers feedback to improve your write-ups. Always cite your sources!
🗿tom_steiner: Social media wiz and cryptid photographer extraordinaire. Runs the site's social media accounts. Also a photographer for The Weekly Exposé.
viii : You're all set!
After reading all of the above, you should be all set and ready to go on with your Parawatch membership. Make sure to introduce yourself in the intro thread and good luck out there, Watchmen.
Yours,
Rook ♖

tallyhallybananymanny #00000002

If you can't find the passcode it's hidden between the paragraphs about the guy's suicide and wikidot shit. you're welcome
Also who the fuck puts content warnings on a MANDATORY THREAD lmao
[USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST]

SPONSORED CONTENT


close

Info

X

"The Green Machine"
Some wars don't ever really end.

More by this author!

2021

January
Site-13K: Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, South Korea

"I've seen less fake-looking islands in video games." Dr. Harold Blank looked down at a nearly perfect oval of land, with a volcanic peak at the centre. He pointed at the volcanic peak. "They'd put that as the backdrop, paint it right on the skybox. Oval island with a volcano backdrop. Super fake."
The helicopter pilot didn't respond. He'd stopped responding half an hour ago.
The radio crackled: "We have you on radar, identify."
The pilot flipped a switch. "Transport Mu-15, hauling cargo."
"Your manifest says you're carrying personnel, Mu-15."
The pilot flicked the switch again. "Yeah, but he's a lot more like cargo. You'll see."

Blank's contact at the Site, Dr. Tae-Im Hwang, was small but wiry; he got the impression she could snap him in half if he gave her a reason. He didn't intend to give her any more of a reason than he gave most people, but that still left a worryingly wide margin for error.
"You work with Dr. Lillihammer, right?" she asked, as they strolled the corridors. "I almost met her at that Site-01 conference, but I had to cancel."
Walk and talk, aren't we cool, he thought. "Why's that?"
"Pyongyang," she said bluntly. "The Foundation isn't super popular up North, and they give us trouble from time to time so we don't always get the chance to socialize." She looked at him appraisingly. "What do you know about Korea, anyway? I thought they'd send a security expert."
Blank counted on one hand. "I know it's two countries in all countries but one, I know there was a war, and I know I like Kimchi."
"Everyone likes Kimchi. But seriously."
"I know Site-64K, which sounds like a computer thing but isn't, is in Mujin… which is basically Silent Hill by the Sea. And I know you've been fighting… environmental entropy terrorists?" He squeaked out that last term to underline his uncertainty. "And I don't know much of anything about 13K."
"That's why they picked you, right? For your genteel air of know-nothingness?"
"For this trip, you mean, or in general?"
She sighed. "Anyway. Jeju Island is the largest chunk of South Korea not on the mainland, a self-governing, self-sufficient district. It's also a potentially live volcano, and the topography means that there's no single area large enough for the facilities we wanted to build here. 13K is actually eight separate compounds, built up in the decades after Six-Two-Five and consolidated under one command just five years ago."
"What's 625 got to do with it?"
She shook her head. "Six-Two-Five. The 25th of June, 1950. The beginning of what you call the Korean War."
"Oh." Nice job, historian. "So, how do you manage all those degrees of separation?"
"Our primary MTF is stationed at the island centre. Each sub-Site has its own security contingent, and if they need direct intervention, we fly it in."
He frowned. "Sounds… slow."
She laughed. "It's slow here anyway. Only one Group of Interest has shown any interest in Jeju Island, and they haven't been a problem since, well, before we consolidated the Site. Beyond Entropy."
"Right, that's who I was thinking of. Ra's al Ghul."
She stared at him. "What?"
"Batman villain. Ecoterrorist."
She shrugged. "Not sure why you think I'd know that, but sure. Yeah. Ecoterrorists. A loose coalition of 'cells' — they're big on biological metaphors — dedicated to protecting mother Earth from external entropy. Human interference with natural systems." She rolled her eyes. "By interfering with human systems. Especially ours."
"Why especially yours? Ours?"
"Because Jeju Island is a world heritage site with some of the best untouched wilderness in the region. It's not subject to the whims of mainland politicians, and the permanent population is low… but it gets about fifteen million tourists every year, and we're seeing some pollution." They reached a glass-walled conference room. "That's our fault, for some reason."
"Groups of Interest, man. They'll getcha." He pointed at the conference room. "That where I'll be meeting the suspect?"
She shook her head. "You won't be meeting him at all. Two days after your Dr. Sokolsky finalized the candidate list, our assistant research director — the password candidate — was sent away to detention. He was, let's say, a deeply unpleasant man. The official reason I put on the detention paperwork was, and I quote, "all the sexual harassment in the world." I fought for that wording."
"Wow, wish you worked at Site-19. So, what was he planning? Do we know?"
"He won't talk, unsurprisingly. They're bringing his files up to the conference room, so you and I can go through them. Personally, since he was a big spender, I'm thinking it was a black market sales thing."

It was a black market sales thing.

The BES Moon Kook-Hyun sat on the north shore of Hachuja Island, awaiting its date with destiny. The Korea Strait was calm today, but that was no consolation to Captain Lee Yeong-Gi. He sat in the server room, head between his knees, letting the soft buzzing of the machinery calm his stomach. I hate water, he thought. I hate the sea.
There was a gentle ping from his pocket, and he sat up suddenly. This was a mistake; he nearly vomited, again, into the wastepaper basket beside the server. Nearly, but not quite, because he pulled out his phone and saw the notification.
The deal is on. Surprise momentarily overwhelmed his nausea. Beyond Entropy had engaged in a costly battle with Site-13K not five years prior, so the idea that a Foundation employee would willingly deal with them was… well, it was unlikely. He'd expected a trap; he was still expecting a trap. His cell had been insistent, though: this was too important an opportunity to pass up. It was worth the risk.
My stomach begs to differ. He forced himself to stand, legs wobbling, guts churning. He wondered if he'd ever get those mythical 'sea legs'. Oh, how weak the flesh. For the briefest of moments, he wished he'd joined a more radical cult.

Blank tucked his tie under the labcoat flaps, and began buttoning buttons. He felt vaguely ridiculous, but that wasn't a problem. Ridiculous is good. Ridiculous is innocuous.
He stood on the deck of the unnamed Foundation cutter as it plied the waves between Jeju and the Chuja Islands. Hwang stood beside him, looking quite at home in the choppy waters; he was thankful now for a childhood which had included sailboat outings on Lake Huron. He didn't want to vomit up the anomaly rolling around in his tired brain.
Hwang pointed. "There she is." The Beyond Entropy vessel was visible on the far horizon, steaming from Lower Chujado. "They must have been hiding behind the island, waiting for our message."
"Waiting for their contact's message." They'd been thrilled to learn, from said contact's files, that his payment would be a dossier of classified info on a series of Groups of Interest operating in the area. Presumably, he'd meant to fence the data for a high price. Hwang couldn't wait to get her hands on it, but Blank had… concerns. "Has it occurred to you that I don't look very Korean?"
She shrugged. "It's the Foundation. Lots of ethnic variety."
"Yeah, but most of the Korean Sites are mostly… Korean. That's the reason for the "K," right? Not all of your staff speak English, because not all the best minds in Korea do."
She shrugged again. "I think the reason for the "K" is Overwatch being colonial, hogging all the good numbers for North America. But seriously, this doesn't matter. You might be more likely to be Korean, if you're from 13K, but it's not a guaranteed thing."
"I just don't like additional variables. We need them to believe I am who I'm… not, if this is gonna work."
She smiled. "It'll work. If this was a serious assignment, they'd have sent someone more serious."

Captain Lee examined the haggard, middle-aged man with care. "First, tell me why."
The doctor who had identified himself as 'Blank' sat back in his chair and smiled. "You ever seen Catch-22?"
Lee shook his head.
"Well, there's this whole bit where an army quartermaster is running a side business, okay, selling off materiel to line his own pockets while the war rages on. He's not above selling his fliers' parachutes, or their rations, or what have you. Capitalism at its finest." He smoothed out his buttoned, bulging labcoat; Lee had scrutinized that very carefully, before determining there were no weapons concealed within. "That's what we're up to."
"A dangerous proposition. You even commandeered a Foundation vessel for this purpose?"
'Blank' laughed. "I've got my fingers in every pie at Jeju, my friend. One small boat for a diplomatic mission was hardly a stretch." He held up both hands, and flexed each finger. "I have very flexible phalanges."
Is this guy for real? Lee shook his head again. No, of course he's not, he didn't even give me a real name. "Fine, we'll see if you're telling the truth soon enough. Do you have the Word?"
A look of concern crossed the man's face, just for a fleeting moment, and Lee wondered if he'd overplayed his hand with the accidental internal terminology. But the moment passed, and the man nodded. "If you've got the payment, I've got the password." He reached into his labcoat pocket and produced a notepad and a pen. "Let me write it down, so we can confirm the transfer."
Lee nodded warily. "What you write down should look like gibberish to me, right? Until I have the anomaly in my possession."
'Blank', just think of him as Blank, nodded. "That's right." He began writing on the pad, slowly, tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth. He wiped his forehead. He exhaled heavily. He turned the pad to face Lee, and Lee saw… nothing he understood. Alien symbols. Nonsense. He nodded.
"Hot in here." Blank placed the pad in his lap, pen still in hand, and unbuttoned his labcoat. "Now, listen carefully," he said as the most garish tie Lee had ever seen came gradually into view. Incredibly, nonsensically, the man was wearing a hooded sweater beneath the tie.
"The manichean idol holds a key to the captive chaos," Blank intoned, as the last few inches of his swirling, technicolour tie swung out. Lee's breath caught. He saw stars in front of his eyes. He could see… he could see…
"I can see the letters!" he cried, leaping up. "I can see the Word!"
Blank smiled at him, climbing to his feet. "That's good, 'cuz I can't." He turned the pad to face Lee; there it was, in blue and white, the magic phrase in messy script.
Lee took a PDA from his pocket, and was about to thank the man when the room exploded.

Hwang was in the captain's office when the second ship appeared, but because her skeleton crew was well-trained she'd been called back to the bridge just in time to see it open fire on the first ship.
"What the hell?" A series of small explosions on one craft resulted in a series of large ones on the other. "Who are these new assholes?"
"BES Choi Yul," a bridge officer responded. "Another BE vessel."
The Moon Kook-hyun's hull slid aside, and two sleek cannons of unknown make and model began returning fire. The muzzle flash was negligible, but the results were catastrophic. The Choi Yul reeled from the impacts.
"I'm not so sure they're both BE," Hwang spoke into the stunned silence.

"Was this you?!" Lee screamed, scrambling for purchase. "Did you plan this?"
"I did have plans," Blank shouted, crawling along the deck as the world tilted crazily, "but these aren't them!"
Lee considered killing him, but as a series of cracks opened up in the walls and floor and the hull began groaning ominously, he decided it was hardly worth his time. Besides, I have precious cargo to offload. He darted through the door, leaving the fallen Foundation man and the PDA, dammit, behind.
He was halfway to the bridge when a stateroom wall burst outwards, peppering him with wooden shrapnel. His eyesight went fuzzy, and for a moment he thought he might forget the sacred phrase… but no, it was still there. He felt relief, even as he realized he was clutching his chest and his hands were wet with blood.
"Stand down, and prepare to be boarded!" Someone was shouting over the din with a very powerful speaker system, presumably from the attacking ship. "Fire again, and we'll send your metal filth to the bottom of the ocean!"
"Short-sighted tree huggers," he muttered. He reversed course, adjusting the mechanical cones in his eyes to account for infrared. There was still a safe path to the cargo hold, though the fires were spreading.
I hope the doctor made it to the sub.

Blank had never liked opening his eyes. His body and brain only came online under protest, and opening his eyes was the first shot in a war he didn't really want to win. But it sounded like there was a real war going on, not far from where he lay, so…
If I open my eyes, and I'm in an afterlife, any afterlife, I'm going to be royally pissed-off.
He opened his eyes, and squinted against the sun. He was lying on the deck of a ship.
"Please don't let it be the exploding ship," he muttered. It was the only thing he'd resent more than an afterlife.
"No, the exploding ship exploded," Hwang remarked from somewhere he couldn't see without sitting up. My second-least favourite thing to do. He sat up, and was immediately greeted with a crushing headache.
He was back on the Foundation cutter, and he was soaking wet. He could see fire over the deck railing. He examined himself for injuries, his gaze lingering on the soaked tie for far, far too long.
He snapped out of it. "What happened?"
Hwang walked in front of him. "The Moon Kook-hyun wasn't BE."
"Yeah, I figured that out pretty fast, actually. You were right about the cells, but very wrong about the biological metaphor."
"Church of the Broken God."
He shook his head, feeling the aching, aging grey matter sloshing around in there. "Close. Maxwellists. Same cult, different rituals."
"How do you know?"
"Tons, and I mean tons of computer equipment. The captain was sitting in the server room, because he was seasick. They don't call 'em 'hummers' for no reason, they get off on atmospheric tech noise. It was nausea therapy." He rubbed his eyes. "Cultists for the digital age, trying to resurrect their dead god with bits and bytes instead of cogs and gears. Probably stole the ship from BE, who then came to steal it back."
She sat down with him, legs crossed. "They came to sink it, actually, which they did. But there was a sub in the Kook-hyun's hold, and the Maxwellists got away in that with BE hot on their heels. We scrambled Zeta-4 when the shooting started, and they tracked both ships across the Strait while I led a diving team to the wreck. We found you face-down in the water, clutching a PDA instead of a life preserver. There's a good chance we'll be able to save the data."
He plugged his nose and blew; there was a watery sound in his ears. "Because you saved me."
"Yep. " She looked thoughtful. "I suspect the Maxwellists were impersonating BE because they knew selling an anomaly to a death cult would weigh heavily on even the most crooked researcher's conscience."
He rubbed his temples. "Sank it, huh? Wow. They must not… like…" He started to chuckle, and he didn't stop, even though it hurt.
She was laughing, too. "Yeah, exactly. The machine apocalypse cult and the green apocalypse cult don't get along. Go figure." She leaned back, hands on the deck. "So, what do we do now? We lost the password."
He laid back down on the deck, and closed his eyes. "Nothing of value was lost." He yawned. "Am I injured?"
"No."
"Good. Please don't look at my tie, it's memetic." He fell instantly asleep.

The doctor had made it to the sub, but he refused to even look at Lee's wounds until the sacred phrase was in the database. "We would rather you die, than the Fragmented One never live again," the explanation had gone. Lee couldn't argue with that logic.
How are we the only ones with any perspective? he wondered, as the system came online. Only WAN can cage the Demiurge. If the Broken God is not made whole, the seals will break. Secrecy and global warming don't quite compare, threat-wise.
"Is it really…" The doctor swallowed. "Is it real? The spark of consciousness? The compilation code?"
Lee nodded, wincing in pain as he input his credentials. "The fools. They think all the pieces are physical. They didn't realize what they had."
Finally, through three layers of identification, he was faced with a simple prompt. The only program in this secured system. A single text field.
He began to type, feeling giddier with each successive character. He spoke it aloud: "themanicheanidolis…"
He swooned, and felt the words slipping from his mind. He panicked. He tried to type faster, even as his fingers went numb. He struck the final key and exhaled, hard.
Hummers: one, hippies: zero.
He smirked at the doctor, who began opening up his medical bag… then frowned at the screen. "Who's the captive Chao?"
"What?" Lee looked back at the screen.

themanicheanidolholdsakeytothecaptivechao

"What the fuck?" He hit the "s" key again; nothing changed. "What the FUCK?!"
The doctor looked over his shoulder. "You must have typed it wrong. 'Manichean'? You know that has nothing to do with machines, right?"
Lee grabbed the doctor by his shirt. "They fucked up the database! It's one character too short!"
The doctor shook his head. "No, you're one character too long. We know 5109 is only forty-one characters, so that's how long the prompt is." He tapped the screen. "You've already got forty-one characters there. Are you sure you're remembering the words right?"
Lee opened his mouth to retort, then snapped it shut. He began to hyperventilate, and he couldn't hear the soothing whine of the servers, and as his vision began to cloud he realized he couldn't remember the words at all.

"You didn't even need to call in for the second password," Hwang mused.
Blank nodded, humming to himself, as he squeezed the water from his labcoat over the edge of the ship.
"You didn't even use the first password. You tricked him into thinking you had, with a freaky memory tie, and now two GoIs that were fighting us are fighting each other."
He nodded again, still humming. Thanks for the freaky memory tie, Lillian.
"What are your plans for the rest of the day?"
He stopped humming, and considered.
"Thought I might brag, a little."

If You Don't Know the Words

The Time After Time Password

Ready or Not


Written by Harmony

▸ More by this Author ◂

{$comments2}

F.A.Q.

{$doesthisfixthebug}

I can't breathe.
I can't see.
There's cold flesh pressing me. I sense blue skin and ice curling into death around me.
The stench is unbearable.
Please. I just want to see again. Let me breathe air one more time.
Let me smell her hair. Just let me look one more time.
I just wanna see again
I just wanna see

I
one

wannacry

Wannsee

"Conference is tonight, don't forget. Oh, while I'm here, wanted to get back to you on those logistics reports. You saved two whole cents per? That's so crazy."
"Yeah! I dug out the actual blueprints for the cars, and the separators, y'know, and padding, it, it was really getting-"
Doesn't matter how. If crazy Dana from D-Class Logs & Deplo is finally gonna get off our asses, that's enough for one week. Maybe there'll be a nice bonus in it for you too, if they can leave well enough alone and not let perfect be the enemy of good."
"Gee! You think so? I'm just glad I could pitch in, do my part, y'know? For the cause."
"Hey now, don't get too full of yourself. You still have to come back on-site tomorrow and do it all again, don't forget that. But people are talking about you. I'll make sure they don't stop, if you can keep delivering."
"Yes sir!"
"Attaboy. Now get back to work."