USER: Z3ke

  THREAD: Pants-shittingly Terrifying

  Let me begin this post by bitching that none of you adequately warned me about how creepy the Glens are at night. You all said that “the NPCs are weird,” and “don’t trade with them.” But damn. That’s the most mild, watered-down milquetoast warning that has ever been given. You made the Glens sound quirky.

  They are not quirky. They are fucking horrifying.

  If I’d been properly warned about this place, I would have locked myself in the deepest, safest part of the library and refused to leave until morning.

  But I didn’t. Now I’ve got a whole host of questions I’m hoping you all can help me with. Think of it as payment for the lack of warning.

  1) What the fuck is wrong with this town?

  Simply saying that the NPCs are off is the understatement of the year. They’re creepy as shit. You know what, no. Creepy doesn’t do it justice. I tried speaking with some of the townsfolk last night and even those few brief conversations sent a chill up my spine and made me want to flee. You all told me that the best short term survival strategy is for me to find a train station and get out of the Glens. Is there a way to do that without needing to speak to any of the villagers and asking for directions?

  2) What counts as trading?

  Don’t worry Story. I followed your advice and didn’t barter or bargain or trade with the NPCs. But those warnings made me paranoid and brought up a question. If I ask something of the villagers and they give me an answer, is that trading for knowledge? I doubt it, but it still got me thinking. What if I work for them? If I sweep out a store or carry some heavy boxes and they give me food, is that considered a trade? Am I trading my labor for goods necessary to survive? I’m trying to follow your advice, but it’s difficult.

  3) Where are the train stations?

  You told me that the stations pop up in different spots for different people, but there’s gotta be some rhyme or reason behind them. Does anyone have any idea about how to find one of these stations? I walked through town yesterday and last night and a bit this morning, but I couldn’t spot anything remotely similar to a train station. I’m hesitant to wander outside town right now, but I guess that’s what I’m gonna need to do to get out of here.

  4) What the hell is up with that bell?

  When I was hunkered down in the library last night, getting ready to go to sleep, I was startled awake by the sound of a giant ass bell ringing. I don’t know what it’s associated with or why it rang in the middle of the night, but I hid myself away until morning. Just the sound of the thing freaked me out.

  Once again, any help is appreciated.

  PaperSnakes

  Nah. Have you forgotten the deal already?

  You entertain us and we help you with lore. Play the role of ‘guy who got isekai’d’ and write about your adventures. Otherwise, there’s no reason for us to interact with this fic.

  Also, you kinda need to do it anyway because you’re not giving us enough information to answer any of your questions. Not that we’d answer any questions without you paying the toll.

  VoidWyrm69

  You were doing so good yesterday. You gave us writing and we gave you lore.

  Go back to that or GTFO

  StoryLeech

  Pay the tax!

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I want to remind everything that this isn’t some kind of game to me and I’m not trying to write a fanfic. This is my life.

  PixelBaron

  Waaahhh! Someone help me. Waahh!

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I had to log into another computer because I punched the keyboard and messed it up. So…thanks for that.

  Since none of you all believe me about this whole thing, I guess my best bet is to just shut up and play along. Fine. We’ll start with what happened after my last post.

  After getting answers to the three questions, I still had some time before the sun went down and night fell. That gave me a small window of time where I could head into town and do some scavenging. I don’t have a watch or anything, but from what I could see outside the library windows I still had a few hours.

  I already mentioned that I never played the Fracture series before. But I have sunk some hours into survival games like Subnautica and Green Hell. I know how those games work. You grab what you can and avoid all the dangers and try to build up a foundation for what’s to come. Since all I had were the clothes on my back, I knew that if I wanted food or water or some way to defend myself, I’d need to get to work.

  So, daylight in the glens. I’ve seen worse towns…in post-apocalyptic movies. I didn’t have any kind of plan in mind, just a half-baked idea to loot a couple houses and maybe a shop or two. My goal was simply to scrape up enough of the basics to not die before I hightailed it out of town. Food. Tools. Clothes. Maybe something I could trade with. Nothing fancy, just enough to get me to civilization.

  In all the survival games I’ve ever played, no matter where you spawn, there’s always something useful. Maybe it’s a small knife or a bit of scrap or a med kit. You can always find something that says “hey kid, welcome to hell, here’s something to help you survive.” But the Glens didn’t have anything like that.

  The entire town was dead. No matter where I went, everything looked like it had been rotting away for decades. Just strolling through town made me feel like I was gonna get tetanus from all the rust and decay. The air smelled like mildew and all the houses seemed to lean slightly too much to one side, like the entire town was slowly collapsing in on itself.

  I’m not gonna bother describing all the houses I broke into, mostly because they were all empty. Every single building was the same flavor of broken. All the cabinets I opened were filled with dust and rot and all the drawers I checked gave me a handful of splinters. Every “maybe this can be useful” disintegrated into dust the second I touched it. Any surface I found was covered in mold to the point that it felt like everything was wearing a thin fur coat. Imagine if moss and dust had a baby and fed it nothing but sadness. That’s what was left of the town.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Instead of wasting my time giving you descriptions of all that, I’ll tell you the three things that I actually did find that were useful.

  The first was a room in a house that was slightly less decayed than the rest of the town. The entire room was covered in blue peeling wallpaper. Stickers held up a rotted out dresser and posters were plastered to the wall, advertising a place called the Atrias FunClub. I don’t know if that’s a clue or anything important. Maybe it’s some lore breadcrumbs. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe Story and Mushroom are gonna be like “oh, Atrias FunClub is the start of a side quest where you meet a clown god and blow up a mountain.” I don’t know. I just decided to document it all in case you guys find it interesting.

  The second interesting things were the portraits. There were tons of them. Every house I entered had portraits scattered all over the place. Living rooms, stairwells, bedrooms, hallways. There were portraits of parents and kids and grandparents and even family pets. Each of them were still framed and hung up like someone was trying to remind themselves what their family looked like.

  Except these portraits freaked me out. It was the faces. They weren’t right. The faces were blurred and warped like someone had gone over them with something sharp and scratched them out. But when I looked closer, I found that there weren't any scratches on the portraits. It was more like someone took digital photo editing tools and just wiped away the faces. But…some of the portraits were paintings. Paintings that had the faces blurred out or scratched off or erased.

  It freaked me out and, again, I don’t know if they mean anything but I figured I’d tell you all about them.

  Finally, I found one last thing. Just as I was about to give up and head back to the library, I found something hidden behind a row of collapsed houses. There was a torn sheet of canvas that had been propped up. It had the makings of a camp. But the camp wasn’t all that old. Not like the rest of the Glens.

  All the houses looked like they’d been abandoned fifty or sixty years ago, but the camp looked like it had still been lived in only a few months ago. There was gear scattered around the place that hadn’t been fossilized yet, and the canvas sheet didn’t disintegrate as soon as I touched it.

  The camp was the only place where I managed to scavenge anything good from. There was a blanket that was ragged but still usable, a small dented cooking pot, and a few cans of food that seemed to still be okay. The labels on the can were gone, but none of them were bulging at the seams so unless botulism in the Fracture-verse is extra aggressive, I figured they were all safe.

  Along with everything else, I also found a notebook in the camp. It looked like a field journal or a travel log. The thing was weathered and dirty and its pages were filled with cramped writing. Or, at least, they would have been filled if half the writing hadn’t been redacted.

  Whole chunks of the journal were scratched out with heavy pen markings. Long black gouges tore through half the pages and the rest were so smeared with ink that they were illegible. It was like someone had tried to hide everything that had been written there.

  What little I’ve been able to decipher tells of a man who wandered into the Glens and started living there. He was trying to solve “the malevolence that stretched its desiccated fingers through the Deadlands from its throne in the…” That’s all I got. Frankly, that little bit freaked me out as much as the whole post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the town.

  I left the camp behind and hauled my meager loot back to the library. There was a small reading room tucked away not far from the row of computers that I’d been using. One corner of the reading room had collapsed in on itself, caused either by water damage or age. A desk was half-broken under a buckled ceiling tile there, and I figured that it would make the perfect hidey-hole for my loot.

  I crammed everything that I’d scavenged into the desk: three cans of mystery food, a small cook pot, and a blanket and piece of canvas tarp. It wasn’t much. Not even enough to survive a weekend camping trip let alone make my way through an unknown land that I didn’t understand. But it was a start.

  With my loot safely stored away, I finally decided to take a proper wander through the rest of the library. When I’d first got to the place I focused on the computers and nothing else. Now, I was checking everything out.

  The book shelves were all covered in dust. The few books that were still readable were all thick academic tomes or reference works; none of which was very helpful in a survival situation. The furniture, weirdly enough, had held up better than anything else I’d found in town. There were some armchairs with only minor cosmetic damage, a table caked in dust, and a rocking chair ringed by those tiny wooden seats built exclusively to torture children’s spines.

  The second floor of the library was even quieter than the rest of it. It was more a storage area than anything else. I found a couple filing cabinets and a few dusty storage rooms. The only thing worth mentioning was the stash of bookbinding materials and a few pencils I found in one of the closets. I grabbed the paper and some scraps of leather and made myself a little journal, then grabbed all the pencils I could find. I decided it would be a good idea to journal my slow descent into madness. It’d give me something to do while hiding away.

  There was one other thing in the library. It was…odd. In one of the storage rooms, leaned up against the wall and half-covered by a sheet, was a large painting. It looked like someone had either hidden the painting or had simply forgotten it was there. I flipped it over and stepped back to get a better look at it.

  The painting was of a landscape. It showed a large grass prairie and an open sky, and in the middle of the prairie was a man walking away from the horizon, towards the viewer.

  But the man didn’t have a face.

  Those portraits that I’d found scattered throughout town all had faces that had been smeared away. They weren’t anything like the painting that I’d found in the library. This man had been painted faceless. There weren’t any smudges or blurriness to him. It’s not like someone came in later and just wiped out his face. It was more like he’d been painted blank. Like whoever had created the painting just didn’t think to paint the man’s face in the first place.

  Behind the faceless man was a swirling mass of eyes. Dozens of them. All painted in awful, obsessive detail. Staring. Watching over the faceless man. Watching me. Watching everything.

  I’ll be the first one to say that I never really understood art. I took classes at a community college a few years back. One of those classes was Art Humanities. Everyone had to take it as part of the general core curriculum.

  In all the class we were forced to talk about old masterpieces and what they meant and all the emotions that they evoked in us and what the painters were trying to say with their work.

  I faked my way through the entirety of that class, talking through my ass about brush techniques and emotional resonance and whatever the hell else I could come up with. I never really understood painting and how people could fall in love with them or how they could create emotions. Then I saw this painting. It was the first time that a piece of art actually did something to me. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt pants-shittingly terrified.

  I remember watching this Youtube video a couple years back. Some guy was filming out in Canada or Alaska or somewhere. The scene opened with this floating dock that wasn’t attached to anything. It was just there on the water with a bunch of boats around.

  Calm water. Calm water. Some talking. And then the bubbles. And frothing. Then this enormous shape rises up just below the surface. Whale. Submarine. Leviathan. I have no fucking clue what it was, but the sheer size of the thing, the unknowable mass that was hidden just beneath the surface, triggered something primal in me. My heart beat faster knowing that something enormously powerful was there, just under the water, just out of reach. Waiting.

  Thalassaphobia is the intense fear of deep bodies of water. Some people liken it to fear of clowns or heights or enclosed spaces. But they couldn’t be more wrong. All those other fears are small things. The deep ocean, though, hides the unknowable. It’s fucking terrifying, and completely justifiable that anyone sane wouldn’t want to venture into that deep hellhole. That intense fear is exactly what I felt while looking at the painting.

  It was like a slow, creeping anxiety. It was the kind of feeling that triggered something ancient and primal in the lizard part of my brain. Not fight. Not flight. Just the need to curl up and get my feet up off the ground before something reached out to grab them.

  It was an ineffable horror that radiated from the faceless man.

  All I could do was turn the painting back to the wall so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, which is when I spotted writing on the back. At the top, in neat lettering: The Last Who Saw.

  And lower down, scrawled in letters that looked like the author was panicked and terrified:

  They came from the dust

  Not to kill, but to consume.

  They trade nothing.

  They only eat.

  And the town feeds them in memory and essence,

  Calling it peace.

  My legs were shaky and unsteady as they led me out of the storage closet. My throat was dry and my palms were clammy and somehow I ended up near an arched window on the second floor of the library that overlooked the main street of Harbor Glen. A pair of armchairs had been dragged up next to the window, put there by someone who enjoyed watching the world outside slowly die.

  I collapsed into one of the armchairs, exhausted and still shaky, and just stared out at the town. The streets outside were silent and still. They were bathed in the dusky gold of sunset that made everything look beautiful as long as you ignored the rot that had seeped in everything.

  Then, a blink later, the town came alive. People filled the sidewalks. A market stall popped up. Laughter echoed through the streets. I watched as two men pushed a cart stacked high with burlap sacks through town.

  It had happened so suddenly. No slow fade-in. Just poof. There.

  The longer I watched the town, the more wrong everything felt. None of the NPCs were moving properly. They stuttered and repeated. A woman waved and her had froze midair for a beat too long before she lowered it, almost like she’d forgotten what she’d been doing. A man was strolling down the street and then he paused, then continued twenty seconds later. The only thing that I could liken it to was shitty animatronics that were at the end of their lives.

  I don’t know how long I sat in the chair staring down at the city. Probably too long. It was long enough to be completely creeped out by all the people and their…unnaturalness. Eventually I made my way downstairs to the entrance of the library. And then I hesitated. My hand was on the handle for the front door but my brain was screaming don’t go outside. But I needed information and I needed clothes and tools and food.

  So I pushed open the door and stepped out into Harbor Glen.